In recent decades, Old Testament scholarship has increasingly adopted philosophical approaches to describe the traditional texts beyond their origins. In doing so, epistemological aspects that appear in the biblical texts have also been taken into account. Even though the biblical texts do not engage in a discourse on second-order thinking, as is customary in Western philosophical traditions, implicit epistemological assumptions can be observed within them. Consequently, various studies have appeared whose aim is to reconstruct some of the associated epistemological presuppositions, problems and perspectives. One part of the canon that lends itself more than others to such comparative-philosophical exegesis is the so-called ‘wisdom literature’. Thus, the Book of Qohelet in particular, but also the Book of Proverbs, have been the subject of epistemological analyses. The epistemology of the Book of Job, on the other hand, has so far received only marginal attention. This changes with this collection of essays, which appeared in 2023 in the journal Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (HeBAI):
Jaco Gericke: Job’s First-Person Knowledge Claims and the Epistemology of Religious Disagreement
Jan Dietrich: Modes of Argumentation: The Epistemology of Arguments in the Book of Job
Katharine J. Dell: Representing Tradition: Exploring the Epistemology of the Friends in the Book of Job
Annette Schellenberg: Reflections on the Limitations of Cognition in the Book of Job
Thomas Wagner: Job as Sufferer: Self-Knowledge under the Influence of Permanent Pain
Mark Sneed: Epistemological Transcedence (the Sublime) as a Rhetorical Device in the Second Divine Speech