This book on Proverbs has taken shape (and changed shape) over a number of years, and I have used some of my earlier ideas for a more ambitious project in articles that link up with the ideas represented here. Early work on this material was done at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, during a sabbatical there, and my thanks go to Donn Morgan, in particular, for making me so welcome and exchanging many ideas about wisdom over lunch. I am grateful to the University of Cambridge for sabbatical terms and summer vacations in which I have completed this work. I am particularly grateful to Cambridge University Press for giving me extended time on which to work on this book and for their patience in my delay in producing a final manuscript. During the time of writing this book I have both got married and had a child, and it is to my husband, Douglas Kinnear Hamilton, and to our son, James David Kinnear Hamilton (born 4 February 2003), that I dedicate this book with love.