"... The couplets of Proverbs 22:28 and 23:10 present us with the opening segment: ‘Do not remove the ancient marker,’ which is completed by two variant closures playing on the verbal motif of ‘father’: ‘which your fathers have set’ and, alternatively, ‘or enter the fields of the fatherless,’ and in their variance rendering radically different signification. While this opening segment echoes a proverb of the Egyptian Amenemope’s ‘Admonitions,’ it is also found in Deuteronomy 19:14 – in a very close variant of the Proverbs 22 couplet, in the context of a ‘law’ of Moses: ‘Do not remove your neighbor’s marker; which the men of old have set,’ a ‘legal’ motif, which in a poem of Hosea is referenced as an analogue, condemning a lawless Judah: ‘The princes of Judah have become like those who remove the marker’ (Hosea 5:10). Such economy of composition is one of the central factors reflected in the close formal proximity of biblical traditions presented as songs and those offered as wisdom. In Job 7:17 and Psalm 8:5 we find the famous interrogatory entrance: ‘What is a person?’ Job completes the query not merely adding the segment ‘that you make so much of one,’ but coupling it with ‘and that you pay attention to one,’ a couplet open to a positive orientation ..."