Proverbs, Book of

• philosophy of Amenemope

95:4.3This wise man of the Nile taught that “riches take them­selves wings and fly away”—that all things earthly are evanes­cent. His great prayer was to be “saved from fear.” He ex­horted all to turn away from “the words of men” to “the acts of God.” In sub­stance he taught: Man pro­poses but God dis­poses. His teach­ings, trans­lated into He­brew, de­ter­mined the phi­los­o­phy of the Old Tes­ta­ment Book of Proverbs. Trans­lated into Greek, they gave color to all sub­se­quent Hel­lenic re­li­gious phi­los­o­phy. The later Alexan­drian philoso­pher, Philo, pos­sessed a copy of the Book of Wis­dom.

95:4.4Amen­emope func­tioned to con­serve the ethics of evo­lu­tion and the morals of rev­e­la­tion and in his writ­ings passed them on both to the He­brews and to the Greeks. He was not the great­est of the re­li­gious teach­ers of this age, but he was the most in­flu­en­tial in that he col­ored the sub­se­quent thought of two vi­tal links in the growth of Oc­ci­den­tal civ­i­liza­tion—the He­brews, among whom evolved the acme of Oc­ci­den­tal re­li­gious faith, and the Greeks, who de­vel­oped pure philo­sophic thought to its great­est Eu­ro­pean heights.

95:4.5In the Book of He­brew Proverbs, chap­ters fif­teen, sev­en­teen, twenty, and chap­ter twenty-two, verse sev­en­teen, to chap­ter twenty-four, verse twenty-two, are taken al­most ver­ba­tim from Amen­emope’s Book of Wis­dom. The first psalm of the He­brew Book of Psalms was writ­ten by Amen­emope and is the heart of the teach­ings of Ikh­na­ton.