Righteousness in the book of Proverbs

مرکز و کتابخانه مطالعات اسلامی به زبان های اروپایی

منو

" Righteousness in the book of Proverbs "
Sun Myung Lyu M. V. Fox

Document Type	:	Latin Dissertation
Language of Document	:	English
Record Number	:	52511
Doc. No	:	TL22465
Call number	:	‭3222965‬
Main Entry	:	Sun Myung Lyu
Title & Author	:	Righteousness in the book of Proverbs\ Sun Myung Lyu
College	:	The University of Wisconsin - Madison
Date	:	2006
Degree	:	Ph.D.
student score	:	2006
Page No	:	223
Abstract	:	Although righteousness is central to the ethics of the Hebrew Bible, it has not been studied as a concept in its own right. Rather, most inquiries in the past were sociological or semantic in nature, focusing on either social justice or the semantic field of righteousness. The present study avoids the conflation of philosophical inquiry of a concept and semantic investigation of words. This study elucidates the particular conceptions of righteousness presented in the book of Proverbs by utilizing the insights from virtue ethics and previous studies of righteousness. A distinctive feature of Proverbs is its emphasis on human character as a moral being and the process of character formation. As virtue ethics takes the virtuous person as the center of its moral reasoning, so does Proverbs use its depiction of the righteous person as its prominent pedagogic device of moral discourse. Instead of offering abstract statements about righteousness, it portrays the life of the righteous person as a paradigm for moral life. This paradigm---called [special characters omitted] "righteous" and characterized as a powerful, compassionate, wise, and happy person---embodies the ideal life of righteousness and wisdom. Righteousness is therefore the human character in toto that encompasses all that is praiseworthy and beneficial for the person who desires and pursues it. This paradigm is then compared with two other paradigmatic characters, namely the righteous petitioner in the Psalms and "the silent man" in the Egyptian wisdom literature. Although the extent of common cultural idioms and conceptual similarity in each comparison is substantial, Proverbs' distinctive emphasis on character formation and internalization of virtues is still noteworthy. The widespread negligence of biblical wisdom literature among the ethical studies of the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament theologies is unjustifiable, since the book of Proverbs articulates keen insights for understanding and practicing the righteous life.
Subject	:	Philosophy, religion and theology; Language, literature and linguistics; Character formation; Hebrew Bible; Proverbs (book of); Righteousness; Wisdom literature; Ancient languages; Bible; 0289:Ancient languages; 0321:Bible
Added Entry	:	M. V. Fox
Added Entry	:	The University of Wisconsin - Madison