Breaking and Remaking Wisdom

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This chapter explores how the preservation of sayings apart from any performative context shapes their potential meaning and influences the process of interpretation. While scholars have often understood proverbs to be self-sufficient texts, decontextualization also renders each proverb essentially incomplete. In order to understand the cultural function of this literary style, another comparative method is developed. Here, reading proverbs in light of the German and English Romantic aesthetic of fragmentation suggests a way of understanding the decontextualization of proverbs, not as a deficiency, but as a mode of representation that serves to provoke the imagination and invite the reader to seek out wisdom. This interpretive approach is then applied to a series of passages from Qohelet, which highlight the imaginative possibilities opened by this reading of the fragmentariness of the wisdom sayings. The incompleteness of wisdom expressed in the proverb means that despite its accessibility, wisdom also remains incomprehensible in its whole, continually open to the accrual of new meaning.</jats:p>