Moving away from focusing on wisdom as a literary genre, the book delves into the lived, embodied, and formative dimensions of wisdom as they are delineated in Jewish sources from the Persian, Hellenistic, and early Roman eras. Considering a diverse body of texts beyond later canonical boundaries, the book demonstrates that wisdom features not as an abstract quality, but as something to be performed and exercised in the level of both an individual and a community.
The analysis specifically concentrates on notions of a "wise" person, including the rise of the sage as an exemplary figure. It also looks at how ancestral figures and contemporary teachers are imagined to manifest and practise wisdom, and considers communal portraits of a wise and virtuous life. In so doing, the author demonstrates that the previous focus on wisdom as a category of literature has overshadowed significant questions related to wisdom, behaviour, and social life. Jewish wisdom is also contextualized in relation to its wider ancient Mediterranean milieu, making the book valuable for biblical scholars, classicists, scholars of religion and the ancient Near East, and theologians.
