The Department of Religious Studies faculty, staff, students, and emeritus professors are mourning the loss of Professor Emeritus J. Kenneth Kuntz, who passed away on Friday, December 8, 2023.  Dr. Kuntz earned his Th.D. from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, working under the mentorship of Dr. James Muilenburg, and in 1967 he joined our department, then named School of Religion as an Assistant Professor of Biblical Studies.  Dr. Kuntz’s focus in scholarship and teaching was Old Testament literature, history, and thought, with a special emphasis on the Psalms.  Ken was a valued member of the department for 39 years, and a beloved friend beyond his tenure.  

You may be interested to see our Facebook post including some pictures of Dr. Kuntz during his time at Iowa. A link to the obituary will be provided when it becomes available.

The department wishes to extend our deepest sympathy to Ken's wife, Ruth, and children, David and Nancy.  

In 2021, Dr. Kuntz was honored with a Festschrift entitled "Biblical Wisdom, Then and Now", with entries from a few of Ken’s former students and colleagues.

Foreword by Alan J. Hauser

Today the term “wisdom” carries a wider range of meanings than it would have had in ancient Israel, where it largely focused on the court of the king, the world of the scribe, and the psalms sung in the temple. Issues addressed in ancient Israelite wisdom included: integrity, justice, candor, evil, deceitfulness, righteousness, and the care of the poor. However, already in Israel’s ancient world, wisdom literature asserted considerable influence beyond the boundaries of its early, courtly context. The exilic prophets, such as Ezekiel and Deutero-Isaiah (Isa. 40–55), and the books of Job, Sirach, and Ecclesiastes all profited greatly from being influenced by earlier wisdom traditions.

In our own time, much in the wisdom tradition speaks directly to our contemporary world, as for example in the teaching that evil contains within itself its own undoing, and wisdom’s words encouraging us to have a supportive relationship with our environment. Wisdom today can help us to mitigate the insider/outsider dichotomy we so often encounter in society, even while encouraging persons to retain their own group identity. The employment of the first person in many psalms can, as noted decades ago by Martin Buber (1937), help all readers imagine themselves as the “I” so as to provide a leveling effect in today’s world, which is so stratified by ethnic and social differences. Wisdom can help us understand our interaction with all of nature, helping us get beyond a nearsightedness in which creation is seen as being solely for human purposes.

This volume will address issues such as these, both ancient and modern, and discuss how wisdom indeed has a great deal to say to our contemporary world. A variety of scholars have come together to discuss wisdom and how it interweaves with today’s concerns and problems. Many, including me, are former students of Ken Kuntz, or colleagues and friends he has known and worked with throughout his many years as a teacher and a scholar. It is to honor him that this volume has been assembled.

I was Ken’s first PhD student to complete the graduate program in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa. I remember vividly my initial meeting with him as I began my doctoral program in August 1968. Ken was welcoming, supportive, and friendly as he and I discussed the graduate program I hoped to pursue, focusing on biblical studies, especially the Old Testament. His warmth and openness immediately made me feel at home, and for that I will always be grateful. I also recall his enthusiasm for wisdom literature, which led him to gently nudge me into the seminar on wisdom literature he was preparing to teach that fall. It became quite clear that his interest in wisdom ran broad and deep, and was contagious.

As his graduate student, one of the things that impressed me immediately about Ken was his openness, indeed eagerness, to consider new ideas and approaches. After an almost fifty-year career teaching biblical scholarship at a state university and being an active participant in Society of Biblical Literature regional, national, and international conferences, I must say that Ken is one of the most open-minded biblical scholars I have ever met. I am not saying he will always agree with new ideas and new approaches, but he will always give them careful consideration, think them through, learn from them, and incorporate them when reasonable into what he is doing. Scholarship in the 1990s, and now in the new millennium, has been trending more and more in that direction, but in the 60s, 70s, and 80s that was not easily found, as scholars tended to group themselves into schools, defending resiliently their own ramparts of scholarship. My hat is off to Ken, as he had that openness already when I first met him in 1968. That openness has had a significant impact on my own scholarship. Ken would of course disagree at times with his graduate students, but it was always in a way which left them feeling supported and encouraged, even as they were challenged. It is a real skill, one to be cherished, when a graduate faculty member can lead a graduate student to see she/he is likely wrong without also causing them to feel eviscerated, allowing the student room to reconfigure and begin anew. Ken, on behalf of all your graduate students, I say “Thank you for this skill in interacting so constructively with your graduate students.” 

Wisdom literature has clearly been one of Ken’s primary interests. One of his earliest publications analyzed ancient Israel’s canonical wisdom Psalms (Kuntz 1974), exploring their formal, thematic, and rhetorical dimensions, the latter a perspective Ken learned from his own mentor, James Muilenburg. Ken’s “The Retribution Motif in Psalmic Wisdom” (1977) continued one facet of this earlier discussion. Abingdon’s The Dictionary of Bible and Religion (1986) subsequently published wisdom entries by Ken on Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon. In 2003 Ken had an animated discussion with James Crenshaw in Currents in Biblical Research, the journal I edited, about the nature and character of wisdom Psalms. Ken has continued to be active in research concerning wisdom, especially as wisdom is evidenced in the book of Psalms.

Ken’s interest in wisdom in the Psalms also led him into numerous studies and articles focused around the Psalms as well as biblical Hebrew poetry, a few examples of which must suffice: a rhetorical analysis of Psalms 20 and 21 (1986), another on a rhetorical-critical examination of Psalm 18 (1992), perspectives in the study of biblical Hebrew poetry (1993), and an article on the nature and function of the motive clause in Hebrew poetry (1998). Ken also wrote definitive analyses on the state of research being done on the Psalms and Hebrew poetry for Currents (1994; 1998; 1999b; and 2012). This brief survey certainly does not do justice to the scope of Ken’s scholarship, but it at least provides a good sense of the quality and breadth of his work, which also included the excellent Old Testament textbook The People of Ancient Israel: An Introduction to Old Testament Literature, History, and Thought (1974, 2nd edition 2012).  

The articles in this volume clearly are reflective of Ken’s openness to embracing new perspectives for studying and making use of biblical literature. Wisdom not only had something to say to the ancient Israelites; it clearly has something to say to us today. That many of Ken’s doctoral students are included in this volume, presenting articles applying ancient Israelite wisdom to the problems and issues we face today, is a tribute to the scholarly broadmindedness Ken has always instilled in his graduate students. That some of Ken’s colleagues are also included is a tribute to his kindness and a testimony to the esteem in which he is held. It is an honor to celebrate with Ken these fruits of his many years of teaching and scholarship.

References

Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Translated by R. G. Smith. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

J. Kenneth Kuntz. 1974. The People of Ancient Israel : An Introduction to Old Testament Literature, History, and Thought. New York: Harper & Row.

_______. 1977. “The Retribution Motif in Psalmic Wisdom.” ZAW 89, no. 2: 223-233.

_______. “The Contribution of Rhetorical Criticism to Understanding Isaiah 51:1-16.” In Art and Meaning: Rhetoric in Biblical Literature, edited by D. J. A. Clines, D. M. Gunn and A. J. Hauser, 140-171. Sheffield, England: JSOT.

_______. 1992. “Psalm 18: A Rhetorical-Critical Analysis.” In Beyond Form Criticism: Essays in Old Testament Literary Criticism, edited by P. R. House, 70-97. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns.

_______. 1993. “Recent Perspectives on Biblical Poetry.” RSR 19, no. 4: 321-327.

_______. 1994. “Engaging the Psalms: Gains and Trends in Recent Research.” Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 2: 77-106.

_______. 1998. “Biblical Hebrew Poetry in Recent Research, Part I.” Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 6: 31-64. 

_______. 1999a. “Ground for Praises: The Nature and Function of the Motive Clause in the Hymns of the Hebrew Bible,” In Worship and the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of John T. Willis, edited by M. P. Graham, R. R. Marrs, S. L. McKenzie, 148-83. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press.

_______. 1999b. ““Biblical Hebrew Poetry in Recent Research, Part II.” Currents in Research: Biblical Studies 7: 35-79.

2000. “Wisdom Psalms and the Shaping of the Hebrew Psalter.” In For a Later Generation: The Transformation of Tradition in Israel, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity, edited by R. A. Argall, B. A. Bow, and R. A. Werline, 244-260. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International.

2003. “Reclaiming Biblical Wisdom Psalms: A Response to James L. Crenshaw.” Currents in Biblical Research 1, no. 2: 145-154.

2004a. “Affirming less as more: scholarly engagements with aphoristic rhetoric.” JSOT 29, no. 2: 205-242.

2004b. “Hendiadys as an Agent of Rhetorical Enrichment in Biblical Poetry with Special Reference to Prophetic Discourse.” In God’s Word and Our World: Festschrift for Simon John DeVries, edited by J. Harold Ellens, D. L. Ellens, R. P. Knierim, and I. Kalimi, 114-134. JSOTSup 388. London: T&T Clark.

2008. “Growling Dogs and Thirsty Deer: View of Animal Imagery in Psalmic Rhetoric.” In My Words are Lovely: Studies in the Rhetoric of the Psalms, edited by Robert L. Foster and D. M. Howard, 46-62. LHBOTS 467. London: T&T Clark.

2012. “Continuing the Engagement: Psalms Research since the Early 1990s.” Currents in Biblical Research 10, no. 3:321-378.

_______. 2014. “Psalms.” In The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics. Vol. 2, edited by R. Brawley. 158-167. New York: Oxford University Press.