Fellow publishes new book on wisdom literature

Dr Katharine Dell (1996), Fellow and Director of Studies in Theology, Religion and Philosophy of Religion, has published The Solomonic Corpus of 'Wisdom' and Its Influence with Oxford University Press.

Dr Dell comments, “Many in the College community will recall the 'wisdom window' in the Chapel where Woman Wisdom is hiding at the gate watching scholars and students walking through, the design of which was inspired by Proverbs 8 and the idea of pathways of knowledge, combined with a few Cambridge and Catz features. 

“My book is the culmination of a number of years of research on the very same wisdom literature of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, which includes Proverbs, but also Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs; all linked in a family relationship to the figurehead of wisdom, King Solomon. Wisdom literature is my specialist area. Some of the chapters were published as articles along the way, but this book brings those and new material together in a new synthesis.”

As a leading expert on wisdom literature, Dr Dell argues in her new book that Solomon is the lynch-pin that holds 'wisdom' in its core texts and wider family together. She explores material relating to definitions of 'wisdom', the canonical corpus of such books redefined, the historical, literary and contextual aspects of Solomon's reign, wisdom influence on psalms and prophets, and the method of intertextuality and its application to texts linking to the Solomonic corpus.

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