I missed my calling.

I'm wrapping up Sunday, and thinking back on that class I teach. The next meeting I need to start thinking about is the board meeting for Quad City Interfaith, on Tuesday night, and I won't think about that until Monday night. I so enjoy teaching these kids, and, so far, they continue to allow me to teach them.

The aspect that I have enjoyed most at each of my roles at work has been the teaching component. Some folks for whom I was the Lead Customer Service Associate said the same thing to me that I opened this post with: "Rick, you really missed your calling." Their thought was that my proper place should have been teaching at the college level, either church history or Biblical studies at some small Catholic college somewhere in the Midwest. Hello, St. John's in Collegeville?

Ah, but the time for my thinking about that has come and gone, as right as the thought may have been.

The book in the Bible that I'm reading now is Proverbs. Proverbs' genre is wisdom literature. We usually think of the wisdom books as Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes. However, wisdom is a theme that runs through much of the Old Testament. The story of Joseph in Genesis is quintessentially wisdom.

Wisdom is frequently personified. Wisdom is not portrayed as being God, but it is what God uses to order the creation. And, the personification of wisdom ("kochma" in Hebrew) is almost excluysively feminine. Something to chew on for those who would maintain that the only available imagery for God is masculine. (This gets even more interesting when the New Testament vision of the Holy Spirit is considered. The Hebrew word for Spirit - ruach - also means wind or breath. The same is true of the Greek word: pneuma. Both ruach and pneuma are feminine nouns.)

The wisdom literature of the Old Testament shows indications of coming from two separate, non-Hebrew antecedents. Proverbs and the Joseph cycle of stories are very Egyptian in theme. Job and Eccesiastes are very Mesopotamian. Compare the themes and moods of the literature, and the differences between the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian come into clear relief. The differences reflect differences that also appear in the extrabiblical literature of the cultures.

So the discussion question: What do you see as the differences between the Egyptian-themed and the Mesopotamian-themed Biblical literature? (No, I don't pose that sort of questions to a bunch of junior high and high school kids.)

Class dismissed.