This is a seven-week course that will introduce youth to the Wisdom literature of the Bible, and you will explore where wisdom can be found and attained. Together, you will listen to and explore wisdom in music, fables and in scripture.

The process is meant to be iterative  – there will be collective exercises that give youth a chance to offer, share, and reflect on ideas, and there are take-home assignments to revisit/revise what they draft in youth group. We will then take the writings and compile a “Great Book of Our Youth Group’s Wisdom”.  The lessons can easily be adapted for online use if needed.

Following are some resources to help you prepare:

• Yale Bible Study Wisdom Literature, Week I Video: What is Wisdom Literature?
• Yale Bible Study Wisdom Literature,  Week I Study Guide: What Is Wisdom Literature?

From Gerhard Von Rad, Wisdom in Israel at 3:

No one would be able to live even for a single day without incurring appreciable harm if he could not be guided by wide practical experience. This experience teaches him to understand events in his surroundings, to foresee the reactions of his fellow men, to apply his own resources at the right point, to distinguish the normal from the unique and much more besides. Man is scarcely aware of this continual guidance, nor of the fact that this experience is only partly contributed by him. He grows into it, it proves true for him, the most that he does is to modify it. Least of all will he reflect on that this experience, looked at more closely, is a highly complex structure. Of course, as we have said, it is constructed out of individual experiences which have been brought into play and purified over and over again. But experiences without preparation do not exist. By and large man creates the experiences which he expects and for which, on the basis of the idea which he has formed of the world around him, he is ready. Experience presupposes a prior knowledge of myself; indeed it can become experience only if I can fit it into the existing context of my understanding of myself and of the world. Thus it can even be that man misses possible experiences offered to him, that he lacks the capacity to register them, because he is incapable of fitting them into the limits of his understanding. This experiential knowledge is, however, not only a very complex entity, but also a very vulnerable one. And this cannot be otherwise, for it renders man an invaluable service in enabling him to function in his sphere of life other than as a complete stranger and puts him in the position of understanding that sphere of life, at least to a certain extent, as an ordered system. Such knowledge does not accrue to an individual, nor even to a generation. It acquires its status and its binding claim only where it appears as the common possession of a nation or of a broad stratum within a nation. But precisely in its [4] quality as a communal possession this knowledge finds itself on dangerous ground. Certainly, on the basis of a long period of trial, it can make for itself a claim to stability and validity. But, in so far as it becomes the possession of all, it is in danger of simplifying and generalizing truths which can be generalized only to a certain extent. Thus the sphere of order in which man is invited to take refuge is at all times under threat. It is fundamentally called in question by every contrary experience; indeed this knowledge can even become one enormous deception to the extent that it tries to shut off the experience of new reality and fights against it alongside periods of disclosure and of movement, periods of resistance and preservation.
. . . .

Every nation with a culture has devoted itself to the care and the literary cultivation of this experiential knowledge and has carefully gathered its statements, especially in the form of sentence-type proverbs. This, then, is one of the most elementary activities of the human mind, with the practical aim of averting harm and impairment of life from man. Not only does the outside world as an object stimulate man’s desire for knowledge; its movements and reactions affect him and, at the same time, subject him to influences. In any event, man must know his way about in the world in which he finds himself in order to hold his own in it.

What we have just described as one of the most elementary activities of the human mind is nevertheless a highly complex phenomenon, for the road from an experience which is considered worthy of the linguistic expression of it – and to this particular linguistic expression – is a long one, one which has by no means been adequately explored. Once an experience has found expression in a proverb, a sentence, a maxim or even an aphorism, a multi-layered process has come to an end. In the interval, the validity of the experience in question must have been proved. Where does this happen? What are the given presuppositions for this type of intellectual productivity? If we disregard the proverb for a moment, then the composition of wisdom literature seems to be connected with particular periods in the intellectual life of nations. How is one to determine its [5] relationship to other “ideological” works of literature? Does it simply fill what has been felt to be a gap? Above all, however, by which intellectual powers is this process carried out? By the reason or rather, perhaps, by a particular type of intuition? The maxim – if we disregard for the moment, its individual types – can function in the most varied contexts. As a trivial proverb it can belong to the world of the simple. It can, however, like a precious stone among trinkets, outshine a poem of the highest quality. The demand which it must always satisfy is that of brevity, of compactness and yet of intelligibility, with, if possible, a clear graphic quality; in short, that of being easily remembered.

Ancient Israel, too, participated in the business of cultivating her experiential knowledge. That in doing so she stumbled upon perceptions largely similar to those of other ancient peoples is no longer surprising. What is surprising, rather, is that many of the most elementary experiences appeared quite differently to her, especially because she set them in a specific spiritual and religious context of understanding. But was ‘reality,’ then, not one and the same?

From Introduction to Wisdom Literature, The New Interpreters Bible v. 5. [at 16]:

The people of the ancient Near East, like people today, were interested
in learning how to live optimally in a world they found only partially
understandable. They took note of successful and unsuccessful ways of
coping with life, stated them memorably, and handed them on to others.
They also observed that life is often inexplicable and the lot of human
beings to be miserable, and they explored such problems in complaints and
dialogues. It was the human task to observe carefully the world the gods
had made and to record their observations. Because of this common
commitment to attend to the world and its rhythms and laws, there is
remarkable continuity among the wisdom literatures of antiquity.

The people of Israel lived in that world and responded to it in literature similar to that of its neighbors. Belief in the sole God, Yahweh, made things different, however. The relation of wisdom to Yahweh had to be explained. The problem of evil was an especially vexing problem, because there were no demons to blame or fate beyond God; there was only Yahweh, whom they celebrated as all-wise and all-just.

The wisdom books now appear in the Bible, a book of books. In the perennial dialectic of the bible, the wisdom books “charge” other books and themselves receive a charge from them. They are incorporated into a story, which Christians and Jews regard as still ongoing. The wisdom books remind readers that one must take hold of life as both gift and task, that there are many possibilities but also profound limits, and that honest observation and fidelity to one’s experience of life can put one in touch with a wondrous order whose source is God. The wisdom books’ starting point of everyday experience and honest observations create common ground for Bible readers to engage other people just as it once did for ancient Israel and its neighbors.