THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM IS PARANOIA: AN OVERLOOKED ASPECT OF THE ‘FEAR OF YHWH’ IN THE CONTEXT OF LACANIAN PSYCHO-EPISTEMOLOGY

Much has been written on the concept of ‘the fear of Yhwh’ in biblical wisdom literature. The scope thereof is said to include anything from sheer terror before the deity to pious respect for benevolence. In this article, a different necessary property of the basic disposition is identified. It is argued that if as many texts in the Hebrew Bible state a) wisdom involves the fear of Yhwh, and that b) possessing knowledge of some sort is a necessary condition for having wisdom, and that c) all knowledge is essentially paranoiac as Lacanian psycho-epistemology suggests, then it follows that d) the quest for wisdom itself is partly driven by paranoia. doi: 10.7833/111-1-26