First Literary Explorations in… Ancient Wisdom Literature

The Bible belongs in ELA classes. It is a foundation of the English language and literature. And it makes great reading. Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are the first books of the Bible that feature in First Literary Explorations. Proverbs are short enough for anyone to get into but also offer depth enough to have inspired thousands of years of study. To say nothing about Ecclesiastes!

For better or worse, realistically, there often isn’t enough time to give the latter book its due. But that’s not to stop you from looking at a poem or two and analyzing it with the tools presented in this unit.

Those tools are primarily figurative language and form (ie, parallelism). You can also make this a memorization-heavy unit, and — as I do in these materials — require students to connect the texts to their real lives.

Note: The slides conclude with this video, which captures the culmination of how the unit is laid out.