Since the discovery and translation of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope in the 1920s, scholars have noted its striking parallels with this section of Proverbs and debated the nature of that relationship. In a 1996 essay, Paul Overland lists seventeen verbal or thematic parallels between the texts, claiming that the author of Proverbs 22–24 excerpted and summarized the Instruction of Amenemope. Most Old Testament scholars are so convinced of this alleged literary dependence that they emend the Hebrew text in at least five places to conform to the Egyptian text and speculatively subdivide Proverbs 22:17–24:22 into thirty “sayings” to correspond to the thirty chapters of the Instruction of Amenemope (e.g., NIV). More caution is warranted, however, since these parallels (1) derive from o…