Despite a lot of time spent trying to get people to recognise that our rational and cognitive life is only a part of what makes us who we are and -vitally- only a (often small) part of what we mobilise to inform our decisions and attitudes, it is nevertheless important to give it proper attention and make sure it is a (but not always 'the') central part in our outlook and action in the world. Hence, a book such as this is important to take notice of.
The writing makes use of many good sources which are deftly deployed having been well understood. So it seems a bit jarring that the exposition of the early chapters of Genesis reads as if the author is taking it as literal history. That's merely a minor irritant though as the theological points are often not dependent on this (and it may just be an artefact of taking the text as given in the way they write or assume closer-to-original hearer/readers would have understood it). I was also interested that the Augustinian interpretation of fall was taken as given and not given a more rigorous interrogation. I wondered how to recast the argument if one didn't treat the text as if it teaches a quasi physical change in the created order at the end of the Genesis 3 story. Is the argument still going to hold if one takes billions of years of development of the earth as fact?
It was good to see an engagement with intertextuality and I found the exploration of the Abel/hebel 'pun' when reflecting on Qoheleth to be quite helpful -a way of reading the Abel-Cain story which brought insight. That said, I'm not sure how convinced I came away about the overall proposition at that point about a dependency or strong intertextuality between Genesis 3 and Ecclesiastes.
Personally, I found some of the discussion about Proverbs and Isaiah and Jeremiah quite hard going. There was a lot of detail abut text and vocabulary and it began to feel quite hard to understand where the individual points fitted in an overall argument.
There did seem to be a tendency to lean heavily on the binaries of wisdom and foolishness and their related terms in a way that appeared to serve a Chistian insider versus a non-Christian outsider. To the point where I was left with the impression that the message of Ecclesiastes \Qoheleth is meant to be understood as unwisdom and I wondered whether it would have been helpful to consider the question of what the book is doing in the canon of scripture -how does it function in context? Why would the rabbis at Yavneh towards the end of the year 70 uprising have included it as scripture and the Jewish and Christian communities have accepted it so? There are some really important questions about reading scripture that lurk around that matter.
I found myself reflecting, in the first half of the book, that it really is not as easy as that. The unwisdom of a lot of popular Christian output can contrast with the wisdom of some outside of the formal boundaries of Christian faith despite the former being avowedly rooted in 'the fear of the Lord' which is the 'beginning of wisdom'. What do we do about the tranches of God-fearing and Christ centred unwisdom all to easy to find today?
At this point I'm still reading it as it's not short. I will add to this review or post a part 2 once I've been able to read the second moiety of it.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book in exchange for reviewing it. There was and remains no pressure to review it favourably or otherwise.
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