PROVERBS 22:17—24:22

Links with Amenemope

The discovery of the Instruction of Amenemope in the early 1920s changed the face of wisdom studies with the noting of strong parallels between this text and this section of Proverbs. The question was whether direct dependence was to be found in terms of literary comparison, and then the further question was whether one could extrapolate a similar social context from this Egyptian court and school text for part or whole of Proverbs. This discovery seemed to highlight the ‘foreign’ nature of Israelite wisdom and its dependence upon international models. In the Proverbs text there is seen to be a mixing of sentence and instruction forms, and the subject matter that is very similar to Amenemope is in a different order. Scholars have generally argued for dependence of Proverbs on Amenemope and not the other way around, Amenemope probably having been first produced between 1200 and 1000 bc, but then circulated for many centuries as a school text. Erman (1924) proposed emendations to the Hebrew text to make it conform more closely to the Egyptian original. He also found a reference to Amenemope in Proverbs 22:20, in the reference to ‘thirty’ (interpreting שלשום as שלושם), arguing that it refers to the number of ‘chapters’ into which Amenemope is divided. Gressmann (1924) tried to show that Proverbs 22:17—24:22 also consists of thirty sayings.