Women in Wisdom Tradition: Review of Carol Fontaine, Smooth Words: Women, Proverbs and Performance in Biblical Wisdom

Smooth Words is a well-researched and entertaining, if somewhat uneven, book on women in the Wisdom tradition in ancient Israel. Fontaine, a faculty member at a small Protestant seminary in Newton, MA, writes with her students constantly in mind, her interactions with them informing her scholarship throughout the book. She is also in dialogue with other scholars in the fields of Wisdom literature and feminist scholarship, a dialogue that gives the book academic rigor and depth.