Author: Ryan O'Dowd

What are proverbs?  Simply put, they are creative sayings that pass along time-tested advice – “the wisdom of many in the wit of one,” it’s been said. 

The “wisdom” part usually goes without saying, but most of us probably don’t spend much time thinking about the equal significance of the “wit.” Consider that few of us know this saying from Calvin Coolidge’s autobiography: “The only hope of perfecting human relationship is in accordance with the law of service under which men are not so solicitous about what they shall get as they are about what they shall give.”  But we all recognize the same idea in the terse words of John F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for your, but what you can do for your country.” (Leaving aside, for the moment, where Kennedy got his poetic inspiration.)

Proverbs, as another scholar has observed, are the “workhorses” of language.  Some have a long history like, “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” “power corrupts,” “and “seeing is believing.” 

But there was a time when “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” wouldn’t have made any sense, because glass houses didn’t exist, and this alerts us to the fact that proverbs emerge every day, often from older sayings.  The British proverb from World War Two, “Keep calm and carry on,” has recently reappeared in everything from “keep calm and eat a cupcake,” to “keep calm and finish your dissertation.”  In recent years one can also “Just do it,” and “Obey your thirst.”  Time will only tell whether “Tweet it” or “Friend me” will work their way into proverbial sayings as well.

Here it’s worth pointing out that proverbs are always reflections of the worldview and values of the culture where they are born.  And for this reason, proverbs aren’t always sources of wisdom!  Consider, for example, what it says about our age that so many proverbs emerge from the capital marketplace, where marketing masters of wit, turn out a steady stream of catchy sayings designed reinforce the beliefs, values, and behaviors that will further their economic interests. 

In the introduction to the biblical book of Proverbs, we read that wisdom is “for understanding proverbs and parables, the sayings and riddles of the wise” (Prov 1:6).  A major part of the wisdom curriculum, in other words, aims to help us be more attentive to the subtle powers of language. Obviously some proverbs can be so simple that they require little analysis, such as “Walk with the wise and become wise.” But others prompt deeper reflection:  “The mouth of an adulterous woman is a deep pit;” “The leech has two daughters, ‘give’ and ‘give.’” 

The worldview embraced by the authors of Proverbs valued this exercise of using language to reflect on the complexities of life in the world. Proverbs chapter 30, for example, calls on readers to ponder several perplexing lists of difficult sayings: “There are three things that are too wonderful for me, four that I do not understand…” and “Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up….”  Proverbs 30, much like the sayings in Ecclesiastes, usher readers into the discipline of wise wonder – of knowing our intellectual limits and how to live in light of them.

Of course it is the artfulness of these sayings that makes them so captivating, and this was, no doubt, part of the reason why many ancient cultures considered proverbs learning a right of passage into adulthood.  I remember my son once creating an email signature using a familiar proverb that, clever as it may have been, seemed to celebrate power and violence in an insensitive way.  When I shared my reservations with my son, he quickly changed his signature to “Listen my son to your father’s instruction, do not forsake your mother’s discipline.”  This made me laugh of course: not only did he learn the basic lesson about violence and power, but he also learned the equally important lesson about the power of wit. 

It’s often been said that humans are talking animals.  Indeed God’s gift of language allows us to become philosophers and scientists just as it does historians and poets.  God inspired the poetry in the Bible, C.S. Lewis once wrote, to incarnate a reality that would otherwise have remained hidden.  So as a student of Proverbs learns wisdom, she learns to listen, read, and speak with an appreciation for the power of words given to us by him, who, in the beginning, spoke all things into being.

I am now accustomed to the look of disappointed faces when tell people that I study the Old Testament for a living.  New Testament always trumps Old.

But I’ve started to ask people why they think it is that Psalms and Proverbs – two Old Testament books of poetry – are so often included with New Testament versions of the Bible.  Why not Genesis, Samuel, or Isaiah? (Why anything at all?)

We are no doubt drawn to proverbs because they provide good advice; but songs, stories, and letters do that as well.  Proverbs’ appeal is also in the endless metaphors it strings to together in trite, catchy language.  Might it be, G.K. Chesterton mused, that we are by nature more poets than philosophers?  I plan to expand on the poetry of proverbs in a later blog.

For now I want to suggest that Proverbs is far more than just a long list of helpful sentences, that its sophisticated structure, its strategically repeated sayings, and what scholars call a system of “root metaphors,” comprised of women, ways, and houses, together allow Proverbs to communicate a worldview, or a set of values and a kind of philosophy for the common folk.  Careful readers of Proverbs, in other words, learn to think systematically and conceptually about what it means to be human in a fallen world.

Here are a few examples to demonstrate the point.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction”

First, take this well-recognized “motto” of wisdom that begins and ends the book (1:7; 31:30).  It also appears twelve more times in various forms in between.  Such structuring and repetition reinforce that the doorway to wisdom begins with faith in God who made the universe.  But it is also this same Lord gives wisdom and is known through wisdom (2:4-5). Wisdom and knowledge of God go hand in hand such that our wisdom will always be in proportion to the maturity of our faith in God.

“My son, do not forget my teaching, but keep my commands in your heart” (3:1).

Second, the location of wisdom in Proverbs is the heart and not the head. And the primary receptacle of wisdom is the ear not the eye.  Be assured that the biblical writers did not believe they had neurons in their chest or that eyesight was automatically suspect.  Rather, as in many pre-scientific cultures, Israelites believed that all human activity emanated out of an emotional and existential center and that wisdom was transmitted through the tradition of the elders.  This stands in contrast to the modern image of humans as neutral, computer-like residuals of ideas or individual learners in ivory towers.

Elsewhere in Proverbs we are told to write wisdom’s teachings on various parts of our body and adorn them on our necks and hands like jewelry (1:9; 3:3; 6:21).  We’re told to love wisdom like a sister, grasp her, and search for her as for gold.  These types of images suggest that wisdom involves an ongoing discipline of orienting the whole of our being – desires, thoughts, behaviors, actions, and emotions – to the ornate architecture and order of the created world.

“Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse… Wisdom also will save you from the adulterous woman, from the wayward woman with her seductive words” (Prov 2:12, 16).

Finally, proverbial wisdom is an antidote to evil and death and our key to human flourishing. Throughout Proverbs, the two temptations of deceitful, violent men and sexy, immoral women represent the two main forces that threaten to divert us from our goal. Even a brief study of human history reveals how violence, power, and pleasure lead to the downfall of people and cultures.

In order to counter these destructive paths Proverbs does not call us to the monasteries of sensual neglect or cultural retreat.  Rather, it offers its own vision of wise ways, prosperous homes, and alluring women (9:1-12 and 31:10-31).  Proverbs also portrays itself pointing the way to the Tree of Life (3:18) and to pleasurable life in a renewed Garden of Eden (8:22-31).  Put another way, wisdom is a kind of learning that resists the desires of evil by nurturing a desire for the renewal of a fallen creation. 

I see it as no coincidence that John’s Revelation applies these same images of cosmic battling women, diverging paths, the Tree of Life, and a renewed creation to inspiring his readers to faith and obedience amidst temptation.  In Proverbs, as in Revelation, everything is at stake for the reader, which is more than sufficient reason to set our lives to “get wisdom and get understanding” and to call her “my sister…my closest friend” (4:5; 7:4).