The next time a skeptic complains about the Bible containing admonitions to beat lazy children, beat them on the head with this book. As a creampuff society, we have lost the realization that for the ancients, education wasn't simply a matter of teaching times tables so we can get a job selling timeshares: Education was a matter of survival, of ensuring that what there was of civilization did not slip over that fine line from order into chaos. Thus all of the Ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature is filled with pithy sayings along the lines of, "A student's back is his ear." Even as today students had to be taught to want to learn -- the only differences are that the options for distraction have become more diversified (i.e., video games, versus, i.e., trips to the prostitute's house), and most of us aren't perceptive enough to see through our society's complexity to know that chaos is just as possible here and now. We don't see a reason to associate severity with education, but if we wait long enough and have enough school shootings, perhaps we will.

Education in Ancient Israel is not about things like educational processes in the ancient world and what kind of pencils they used. Rather, it is mainly an examination of attitudes towards education, and its role in ancient society (not just Israel, despite the title). It is an examination also of perceptions about knowledge and wisdom (they knew, as we should know, that one does not mean the other!), and about the prize of literacy (which was enjoyed by fewer than 10% of ancient people, and in some nations, probably less than 1%). It is, finally, for apologists, a reminder that skeptics are playing the role of bigots when they read the Bible only through their own social lenses.

I award Crenshaw two thumbs rather than three, because his writing style is very dry, and there is also a two-page, misplaced diatribe on fundamentalism. But then again, this is not intended to be easy reading. We often have to earn our education as much as the ancients did.