Proverbs: Chapters 1 to 14

When I began this project, I decided to read Psalms 1-2 a day on the side, because - as I noted in my "Why am I doing this?" page - reading all 150 Psalms straight through is the Bataan Death March of Bible reading. Frankly, the wisdom books in general are tough to get through straight on like that - they are better served in bite sized portions instead of full meals.  In that spirit, now that I'm done with Psalms, I'll tackle a Proverb or two a day on the side.  

Psalms came to an end here, so time for Proverbs. 

CHAPTER 1

Well, the Book of Proverbs opens with a prologue telling us that this is to give everyone some wisdom.  Yup, that sounds about right.  Most of the prologue is reasonable sounding, but I was surprised by a key line toward the end: “”Fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.”  Wait – what?

I’m trying to figure out the appeal of that mindset.  I have some half-formed ideas.  You must recognize that there is something bigger than you. Acknowledging a power beyond yourself gives you a sense of your place in the divine creation.  If you don’t get too pigheaded, then you can have enough self-discipline to avoid acting unwisely.  I like to think that’s what is meant by fear of God being the beginning of knowledge.

Then we move into the first segment, which is advice to children – basically sons.  Though this book is attributed to Solomon, the voice here is maternal. It’s even called, “Instructions of Parents and Woman Wisdom.” 

The first segment in it is entirely reasonable.  When people try to entice you to sin, just say no.  What’s really interesting is how sin is depicted.  This isn’t playing hooky or ignoring the Sabbath.  It’s lying in wait for passerbys to attack and murder and rob.  Hokey smokes!  This is gangbanging.  Yeah, definitely so no to that.  The reason you say no?  People that do that are digging their own graves.  They might gain wealth in the short term, but they’re screwed in the long term.  Yeah, that makes sense.

Then we’re told that if a person ignores wisdom, and acts poorly, if a person finds himself (or herself) screwed over and only then asks for help – wisdom will not be there for that person.  Ouch.   What’s weird is that wisdom is being referred to here like it’s God himself.  That’s interesting  - doubly so if this really was written by Solomon.  After all, he was known for being very wise, and then eventually going out of step with God.

CHAPTER 2

This is just a poem to how wonderful wisdom is.  If you quest for it like others quest for silver, it’ll go great for you, for wisdom let’s you understand the fear of the Lord.  Again, it’s all about being afraid of the Lord.  He’ll look after the good – “He has success in store for the upright.”  Right there is a nice line for Prosperity Gospel folks. 

There is also a bit towards the end talking about how others might try to lead you astray, including: “a foreign woman with her smooth words.”  Hey, hey!  Even back then they wanted nice Jewish boys to be only with nice Jewish girls.

CHAPTER 3

This one has a few sections, but the most memorable is the first one – “Confidence in God Leads to Prosperity.”  As the title indicates, this one is pure prosperity gospel – believe in God and you’ll be rewarded with riches. Specifically, you’re told that “your barns will be filled with plenty.”  Just a reminder – people back then mostly worked on land and farms.

To its credit, this also tries to explain how the prosperity gospel works.  Trust in God and take care of yourself.  Avoid vices and it’ll mean your flesh will be healthy and your bones vigorous.  Then wealth will follow.  Also, you’re flatly told not to trust your own intelligence.  That’s interesting.  Instead, trust in God.  I guess the idea is don’t think you’re the source of all wisdom, because you’re not.  Don’t get too cute in your thought process.  I’m not a fan of prosperity gospel myself – it strikes me as trying to put some Biblical sanctification on greed, but I have no problem with trying to encourage people to be healthy in body and mind.

The rest is pretty generic.  The last part tells you to be a good neighbor and don’t plot evil against them or envy violent people.  Man, the first chapter tells us not to become gangbangers and this one tells us not to envy violent people.  Clearly, they had some trouble with this stuff in ancient Canaan.

CHAPTER 4

Meh.  This one isn’t bad, but a lot of the advice is generic.  The first part is a peon to loving wisdom. You are to get wisdom because it helps understanding.  It says, “The beginning of wisdom is; get wisdom.”  Yeah, that probably could’ve been better put. There is so much happy talk about wisdom and it’s all so generic, that it begins to sound like a pyramid scheme. Mind you, I’m all for wisdom – I just thing this makes a sucky case for it.

Then we shift into a section where Solomon addresses us like we’re his son.  (Actually, he does that a lot, but very directly in the middle of Chapter 4).  It’s nice advice to avoid wickedness and violent and walk the straight and narrow.  But it’s pretty generic.  Also, I find it interesting that a series of statements attributed to Solomon are portrayed as him talking to his son.  Folks, Solomon’s actual son was a disaster.  He helped cause the split in the kingdom.

CHAPTER 5

This is a statement warning a young man against adultery.  This is a rather interesting piece of advice, given that it’s attributed to Solomon.  Folks, this is a man who reputedly had 300 wives and many more concubines.  Yeah, that didn’t count as adultery, but if you can marry several hundred women and have nearly a thousand on call for your sexual whims, you’re really no one’s go-to guy for a talk about staying on the straight and narrow when it comes to sex.  Most people aren’t in a situation where they’re able to have hundreds of wives.  Most Hebrew will have just one.  And all this talk, while pleasant sounding, reeks of hypocrisy.  If I’m an average Israeli, I don’t need them from Sir. Hump-a-Lot.

In fact, various portions of this warn against going after an outsider, a stranger.  Yeah, that could be code for foreign women, and of course Solomon was known for having many foreign wives.  Now maybe this is some latter on self-reflection as Solomon is learning from his errors.  But nothing in here indicates that.  It doesn’t say, “learn from my mistakes” it just says, “don’t do this.”   As is, this reads like Hugh Hefner telling kids to stay monogamous. 

Also, there is an Oedipal angel to this as well.  After all, Solomon’s parents were David and Bathsheba.  Now that was a relationship that began as adultery.  David saw her, wanted her, had sex with her, and impregnated her – all while she was married to another man.  Solomon was conceived after the two were married, but that’s how their relationship began.  So that’s an interesting thing to realize when reading this.

In all, the advice is sound, but the advice giver needs to come off like he’s aware of his own follies, instead of coming off like some perfect oracle. 

CHAPTER 6

This is just a grab bag of advice.  One part of it is don’t fall into debt, because then you’ll have “fallen into your neighbors power.”  But the advice for getting out doesn’t make much sense: “Go, hurry, rouse your neighbor!  Give no sleep to your eyes, nor slumber to your eyelids.”  I must be missing something – how will waking up your neighbor help you?

You’re also told to work your, with an Aesopian analogy of an ant as hard worker.  Some of this advice reminds me of Poor Richard’s Almanac by Benjamin Franklin.  With Franklin, he rarely originated ideas, but instead expressed them as well as possible.  I’m wondering how much of Solomon’s ideas was him and how much was his court writers.

Then we get a little bit about avoiding scoundrels.  One background theme here is that ancient Canaan sounds like a dangerous place to live.

We’re told there are six things the Lord rejects – then it’s immediately turned into seven things.  It read like the Monty Python sketch about the Spanish Inquisition.  At any rate, the seven things are: 1) haughty eyes, 2) lying tongue, 3) hands shedding innocent blood, 4) plotting hearts, 5) feet turning to evil, 6) uttering false witness, 7) sewing discord. 

That all sounds nice, but so far proverbs just sounds like various bits of good advise.  I’d like to see an underlying ethos, but mostly its just act good.  That isn’t bad, but it falls short of the hype we were earlier given to Solomon’s wisdom.  To be fair, I’m largely rooting for this book to be a disappointment.  Kings I really annoyed the hell out of me with the non-stop puffery talk about how wonderful Solomon was while giving so little evidence for it. 

Finally, the entire second half of the chapter is warnings against adultery.  Mind you, this is right after a previous chapter that was all about adultery.  I guess it could be because adultery was such an easy sin for young men to fall into.  But I’m always aware that Solomon himself was the product of a union that began as adultery.  And the advice here would clearly condemn Solomon’s own parents.  He tells you to stay away from another man’s wife, and that it’s a trap and that all who sleep with another man’s woman will get punished and you shouldn’t give into lust.  That’s just on David.  With Bathsheba, Solomon portrays the married woman who enters into adultery as a seductress.  He talks of “the smooth tongue of the foreign woman.”  Actually, saying “foreign woman” makes it sound more like it’s about Solomon’s foreign wives; the ones who led him away for the Lord.

Anyway you slice it, Solomon is condemning those around him.  Does he condemn himself?  Well, I’d really like to see some awareness of the foibles of the author here.  Instead he comes off as the oracle, not as a faulty person like the rest of us.

CHAPTER 7

This entire chapter is titled, “The Seduction.” Again, these proverbs – supposedly coming from Solomon – don’t really sound like the sorts of things Solomon would say.  In fact, this sounds like the writing of a stereotypical Jewish mother.  This is a strong warning against being seduced by a “foreign woman, with her smooth words.”  And not just words, as this chapter imagines the foreign woman lurking in the streets, ready for an “ambush” where she grabs a nice young Jewish boy, kisses him, and invites him back to her place.  Women are the danger and the aggressor here.  These foreign women are a bunch of harlots. 

And the nice young boys are just innocents who don’t what they’re getting into.  They are compared to “a stag that bounds toward the net, till an arrow pierces its liver.” 

So far, the proverbs have been really concerned at keeping the seed insides the tribes.

CHAPTER 8

This is an interesting chapter.  It’s about how wonderful wisdom is, but rather than just be some disembodied value, wisdom comes off like an actual person.  Or angel, more like it.  Actually, this makes wisdom seem like a deity in and of itself.  It’s responsible for much of the good in this world, and more important than many things people hold valuable, including gold and silver. 

Oh, and this chapter is mostly from the point of view of wisdom.   Here, wisdom is a person talking to us, about how great wisdom is.  It’s interesting.

I find it fascinating that wisdom is held aloft as the most important virtue of all.  It’s not loyalty or obedience or morality or piety, but wisdom.  True, it’s presented as the key to all of the other values listed.  Then again that doesn’t fit the story of Solomon’s own life, where he was very wise, but ultimately disloyal to God, disobedient to his ways, living impiously.  But you’d never know that reading these chapters.

But this has a lot of importance.  By raising wisdom to a cardinal virtue, it promotes the pursuit of knowledge and of study.  That isn’t necessarily required in this religion.  You could just make it all about obedience.  But by prioritizing study, you indirectly justify Biblical scholarship and a critical attitude to all things, even to God himself.  Much of the modern, often secular worldview comes from this.

Which, if I’m reading this right, is the real value in Solomon.  Maybe someone else wrote these.  Maybe he had a staff write them, or they were just bits of folklore attributed to him.  But regardless of who wrote them, it seems undeniable that Solomon is the driving force behind promoting wisdom.  Otherwise, it doesn’t make any sense that his reputation as Captain Wisdom would be so strong after his death, or that so many statements about wisdom would be attributed to him.  Solomon might be the key figure in justifying the modern view of the world – critical, based on reason and study. 

CHAPTER 9

The highlights of this chapter is a series of general aphorisms in the middle of it.  Here are some highlights:

Whoever corrects the arrogant earns insults; and whoever reproves the wicked incurs opprobrium. 

Reprove the wise, and they will love you.  Instruct the wise, and they become still wiser.  Teach the just, and they advance in learning.

Yeah, I haven’t been too impressed with proverbs for the most part so far – but that stuff above is gold; just gold.

CHAPTER 10

The header here is “First Solomonic Collection of Sayings.”  Wait – so the first nine chapters weren’t Solomon?  Aw, man – I feel like a grade A idiot now.  Half of my commentary (at least) was based on the sense that I thought Solomon was the attributed author of all of this.  Well, that means so far my commentary hasn’t been worth a fart and a half.  Ah, well….

It’s just a random collection of sayings, with nothing really thematic to clearly unite them.  There is some good stuff here.  I like “The slack hand impoverishes but the busy hand brings riches.”  Actually, that reminds me that these proverbs remind me a lot of Poor Richard’s Almanac by Benjamin Franklin.  There are celebrations of hard work (like the one above), of honesty – “One who winks at fault causes troubles but one who frankly reproves promotes peace” – similar virtues. 

But whereas Franklin focused more on virtues that’ll help you get ahead in life (in a financial sense), this also has broader visions, including calls for justice: “The mouth of the just is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.” 

There is also a call to keep silent, as we’re told, “those who retrain their lips do well.’  That’s interesting.

CHAPTER 11

More random statements.  The themes are still the same – and it still sounds a lot like Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac.  A few interesting points:

“Harm will come to anyone going surety for another, but whoever hates giving pledges is secure.”  This is anti-debt which is actually opposed to the modern spirit of capitalism, in which taking on some debt is a worthwhile risk.  The trick is to keep the debt load manageable (which is a really big problem nowadays, but still – the notion that all debt is bad went out with debtors prisons). 

“Like a golden ring in a swine’s snout, is a beautiful woman without judgment.”  There’s a nifty insult for you.

“A gracious woman gains esteem, and ruthless men gain wealth.”  Well that’s interesting.  Typically the Bible isn’t anti-wealth.  In fact it’s often seen as a sign of God’s favor (providing fodder for prosperity gospel types).  But this little nugget clearly takes a different tact.  I assume that all wealth attained isn’t bad (this is, after all, attributed to the fabulously rich Solomon), but just using unfair means to gain wealth).

CHAPTER 12

This one gets off to a nice start: “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but whoever hates reproof is stupid.”  HA!  I get a big kick out of that – the Bible is calling people stupid!   It also fits with another verse later on: “The way of fools is right in their own eyes, but those who listen to advice are the wise.”  

There is a definite theme that the willingness to listen to others and accept criticism is wisdom and being sure in yourself is the path to foolishness.  This is mirrored in Greek philosopher Socrates, who believed that he knew nothing but realized it, but others knew nothing but didn’t realize it – making Socrates the wisest man in the world.

Rather strangely, then – and very much unlike Socrates, we’re told: “The shrewd conceal knowledge, but the hearts of fools proclaim folly.”  OK, but who is to correct the wise if the wise keep their mouths zipped.  This is just part of a theme in Proverbs of part of wisdom keeping your trap shut. 

We also get a verse for PETA: “The just take care of their livestock, but the compassion of the wicked is cruel.”  Well, it’s sorta PETA. 

We’re also told, “Better to be slighted and have a servant than put on airs and lack bread.”  Yeah, I don’t actually know what that means.

CHAPTER 13

More random statements.  Really, they all start sounding the same after a while.  The themes are the same as well.  Knowledge is good, and the wise keep their mouths shut and accept correction.

It’s interesting that the Bible places such a strong emphasis on knowledge.  It doesn’t have to be that way you know.  It could emphasize obedience or pure faith, but instead books like this are more about knowledge.  That’s actually a theme going back to Genesis.  Jacob was a dick, but he was a smart, savvy player.  And he’s the guy all the Hebrew are named after – for he is Israel and they are the Children of Israel. 

There is also a theme of wealth.  It’s not the main focus, but the Bible doesn’t seem at all anti-materialist.  All that stuff about the love of money being the root of all evil or a rich man going into heaven being tougher than a camel passing through a needle – all of that comes in the New Testament. 

But like I said, wealth isn’t the main focus, just a proper result of a godly life.  And you must go about it properly.  We’re told, “Wealth won quickly dwindles away, but gathered little by little, it grows.”  That’s good info. 

CHAPTER 14

This has one weird moment, as we’re told, “Even by their neighbors, the poor are despised, but a rich person’s friends are many.” Hey, wait – that’s mean!  It sounds like it’s justifying the rich having all the friends and the poor getting the shaft.  Forget mean – that goes totally against the main thrust of the Bible, which urges good treatment for the poor.  Even in the proverbs where wealth is lauded, it’s always coupled with a sense that you must give alms and help the poor. I have no idea what’s going on in this verse.

The good news is the very next verse contradicts it, saying: “Whoever despises the hungry comes up short, but happy the one who is kind to the poor.”  I guess they’re supposed to go together.  If so, it could’ve been handled better, but they must be handled together.  Either that or they let Donald Trump write a verse for no reason. 

Really, though, support for a bountiful life and being wise seem to be the main themes here; even more than following God’s orders.  That does sound like Solomon.  He was supposed to be wise and he was very wealthy, but he wasn’t very godly.  As noted already, it’s books like Proverbs that really put a priority on critical thinking, and that helped send western civilization out on its course.  It’s not just Proverbs or the Bible – take a bow, Socrates.  But this will be the holy book, and it is openly and adamantly on board with learning.  We’ve come a long way from the forbidden fruit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden.

Click here for the rest of Proverbs.