Proverbs — themes & analysis

The framework appears in the first chapter and is fully in place by the last verse of chapter 9. Chapter 1 introduces it with the call: 'My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.' Chapter 4 develops it: 'The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day. The way of the wicked is as darkness; they know not at what they stumble.' By the end of chapter 9 Wisdom has built her house, killed her beasts, mingled her wine, and sent forth her maidens to call from the high places of the city: 'Whoso is simple, let him turn in hither.' Folly is also there, sitting at the door of her house in the high places of the city, calling to passers-by: 'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.' The two voices are deliberately structurally parallel. The reader is being trained to hear them in the same register.

The framework is what most twentieth-century readers find both productive and uncomfortable. Productive because the moral imagination that takes for granted a binary between virtue and vice — between the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death — has resources that more agnostic moral pictures lack; the proverbs deliver their punch precisely because they assume the binary. Uncomfortable because the binary, taken without the corrections of Job and Ecclesiastes, can curdle into a triumphalism that the lived world does not support.

The canon's decision to keep all three wisdom books is the canon's way of holding the two ways framework as a framework — true at the level of pedagogy and the orientation of a life, partial at the level of theodicy. The two ways is where one starts. It is not the whole of what the Hebrew Bible has to say.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (Wisdom calls), Chapter 4 (the shining path), Chapter 9 (the two banquets), Chapter 14 (the way that seems right).

'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.' (1:7) The line returns at 9:10 in slightly varied form and is presupposed throughout. What the book means by yirat YHWH — the fear of the Lord — is not terror in the modern sense. It is the disposition of reverence, awe, and acknowledgment that the moral order is not of one's own making, that one is accountable to a wisdom prior to one's own, and that the universe one is trying to live in well is governed by a God whose existence one is taking seriously.

The epistemological claim is striking. Most modern epistemology assumes the opposite — that the inquirer must begin in neutrality, suspending commitments, in order for the inquiry to be honest. Proverbs holds that some inquiries are not available to neutrality, that the wisdom inquiry is one of them, and that the disposition to take the moral structure of reality seriously is itself the precondition of seeing what one is trying to see.

The claim has resonance well beyond the religious sphere; analogous claims are made in moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch and Charles Taylor about the role of attention and orientation in ethical perception. What Proverbs adds is a doctrine: the orientation in question is not just attention to the moral; it is reverence toward a particular God, and without that reverence the wisdom enterprise cannot get started. Chapter 16 develops this from the inside: 'The Lord weighs the heart.' Chapter 21: 'The horse is prepared against the day of battle, but safety is of the Lord.' Divine sovereignty is not one theme among others; it is the ceiling of the entire room.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (the programmatic line), Chapter 9 (the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom), Chapter 15 (the Lord is in every place), Chapter 16 (the Lord weighs the heart).

Wisdom — Hebrew Hokmah, a feminine noun, personified as a woman in part because of the grammar — stands in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates, and lifts up her voice. 'Unto you, O men, I call; and my voice is to the sons of man.' Her great speech in chapter 8 is one of the boldest passages in the Hebrew Bible. She declares that the Lord possessed her in the beginning of his way, before his works of old. She was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When he prepared the heavens, she was there; when he set a compass upon the face of the deep, she was by him as one brought up with him; she was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth, and her delights were with the sons of men.

The passage gave later Jewish and Christian interpretation a textual basis for thinking about pre-existent wisdom — for the doctrine of personified Wisdom in the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon, for the rabbinic identification of Wisdom with Torah, and for the early Christian reading of these chapters as referring to Christ as the pre-existent Wisdom of God. Paul's 'Christ the wisdom of God' in 1 Corinthians 1, the Logos of John 1, and the Wisdom Christology of Hebrews 1 all have a foot in these chapters.

Lady Folly is Wisdom's deliberate counterpart. She also stands in the high places of the city, also calls to the simple, also offers a meal — but the meal she offers is bread eaten in secret and water that is stolen. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. The two figures are not allegorical decoration; they are the structuring image of the opening section of the book. Every two-line proverb that follows is, in some sense, a small specification of which woman the listener is being summoned to follow.

Where to follow it: Chapter 1 (Wisdom in the streets), Chapter 7 (the strange woman), Chapter 8 (Wisdom's great speech), Chapter 9 (two banquets).

'A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.' (15:1) 'Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.' (16:18) 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones.' (17:22) 'The rich and poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all.' (22:2) The form does several things at once. It compresses observation into a shape the ear can hold; it teaches by symmetry rather than by proof; it leaves space, in the gap between the two lines, for the listener to fill in the implication.

Robert Alter has argued that the parallelism in Hebrew poetry generally is not synonymous — saying the same thing twice — but intensifying: the second line specifies, sharpens, or moves the first. This is true of Proverbs at its best. The two lines do not just balance; they swing. The form has had a vast afterlife in Western literature, in everyone from François de La Rochefoucauld to Lichtenberg to Wittgenstein at the level of single sentences, and in the longer epigrammatic traditions of Pope, Twain, and Wilde.

What Proverbs gives the tradition is the model of the moral observation that earns its memorability not by elegance alone but by the compression of an ethic into a shape that can be carried in the head and applied across cases. Chapters 26 and 27 show the form at its most virtuosic: chapter 26's concentrated catalogue of the fool and the sluggard, chapter 27's cluster of friendship proverbs, each image pressing the one before. The book is a manual of how to think clearly in two lines.

Where to follow it: Chapter 10 (the Solomonic collection opens), Chapter 15 (the soft answer), Chapter 16 (pride before destruction), Chapter 26 (fool and sluggard).

Proverbs assumes that the world is morally ordered, that wisdom can be acquired and that its acquisition is rewarded, that the diligent prosper and the lazy fail, that the upright are blessed and the wicked overthrown. The book's confidence is not naive; it is the working assumption of a long, observant, urban, agrarian civilisation that has noticed how things tend to go. Most of the time, in most lives, the proverbs are right.

Job is the limit case from beneath. The diligent, righteous, God-fearing man — the proverbial man, the wisdom man — loses his children, his livestock, his health in a single afternoon, and the friends who come to comfort him with the doctrines of Proverbs are explicitly rebuked by God at the end of the book. The doctrine of retribution that Proverbs assumes is, for Job's case, exactly what cannot be said. Ecclesiastes is the limit case from within. Qoheleth has tried every project the wisdom life can attempt — wisdom itself, pleasure, wealth, work, the pursuit of memory — and found that all of them are hevel, vapor, breath. There is one event to the righteous and to the wicked. The race is not to the swift.

The reader who comes to Proverbs without these correctives is liable to the prosperity gospel and to the cruelty of telling sufferers that their suffering is their fault. The reader who comes to Proverbs with these correctives reads it as the wisdom literature it is: pedagogically true, statistically true, morally true at the level of the long aggregate, and not what one says to a man sitting in the ashes. Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible is a conversation among three voices, and Proverbs is the first voice.

Where to follow it: Chapter 6 (sloth and the seven abominations), Chapter 14 (the way that seems right), Chapter 20 (who can say I have made my heart clean?), Chapter 30 (Agur's radical humility).