The Voicing of Cult Critique between Proverbs and Prophecy

Questioning the value of cultic worship relative to YHWH's more fundamental demands, especially justice, is commonly associated with the biblical prophets. However, it also appears in the Solomonic collection in Proverbs (10:1-22:16) and in other wisdom literature. Scholars have debated this sapiential attestation of a theme often regarded as peculiarly prophetic, usually positing a genetic link in which one genre influenced the other. This article argues that generic categories unhelpfully constrain our understanding of cult critique as a discourse. On the one hand, Proverbs and the prophetic books reflect similar ideas of cult critique. On the other hand, they voice that cult critique differently: the passages in Proverbs are measured aphorisms, while those in the prophets are fiery proclamations. This is less about differences between wisdom and prophecy than about how these corpora present cult critique as speech: private advice from a mentor versus public social criticism from a disempowered outsider. Cult critique in Prov 10:1-22:16 furnishes a compelling case that voice is a productive criterion for thinking about both the organizational logic of this material and the category of "wisdom" itself.