This
post represents an important milestone. By starting the Book of Proverbs, I am
now officially furthest I have ever managed to read in the Bible. You may
recall from my introductory post way back in May of 2013 that my last attempt
to read this thing bogged down and ended with Psalms.
Of
course, if you read my last post then you know I cheated a little bit this
time: I skipped almost two thirds of Psalms. There’s a good reason it stopped
me the last time. Namely, that reading through the Psalms is torturously
tedious. So I told myself I’d try skipping back to deal with individual Psalms
later, and I’ve moved on to Proverbs.
Oh!
Another milestone! I’ve passed the halfway mark! We’re on the downward slope
now!
Now,
Proverbs is set forth as a collection of sayings and essays from Solomon
himself, the Biblically declared wisest man who has ever lived or who ever will. What
should we expect? I mean, it probably won’t be as wise as the stuff God says
himself, because Solomon is only a man. On the other hand, he is the wisest man ever! So it’s gotta be pretty
good stuff, right?
Well,
the good news is that there does seem to be some good advice in here. On the
other hand, there’s some stuff that doesn’t seem so great, and there’s also
some total gibberish. But let’s start at the beginning.
The
Book of Proverbs opens up with a simple introductory statement that we are
reading the proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. It then goes on
to say that to know wisdom, justice, and insight, a wise man must be willing to
listen to instruction and continue to learn. Not too shabby a beginning, until
you hit the seventh verse:
“Prov 1:7 The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge; fools
despise wisdom and instruction.”
It
says a good bit about the character of the god Solomon is describing that he
should say fearing him is the first thing you should know. Not love, not
understanding, but fear. And I should point out that, logically, one would have
to know (or at least believe) this Yahweh exists and something of the brutish
nature of his personality before one could reasonably start fearing him. So to
say you need to begin at fear has already skipped a few steps.
Although…
it occurs to me that he could be saying that the thing Yahweh fears most is
people beginning to gain knowledge. That would be fairly consistent with the
rest of the Bible, actually, but it seems unlikely to be something Solomon
would have believed.
Moving
on, though, Proverbs continues as though Solomon is explicitly addressing his
son with words of advice. And we do get some good advice about not letting
people talk you into doing such unpleasant stuff as murder and theft. Then it
just randomly moves into a section that kind of personifies wisdom as a woman
that talks to people.
“Prov 1:20 Wisdom cries aloud in the street, in the markets she
raises her voice; 21 at the head of
the noisy streets she cries out; at the entrance to the city gates she speaks:”
What
follows that quote is a lengthy first-person soliloquy by this wisdom person
about how awesome it is to have her, and how calamity will befall those who
reject her. It includes imprecations about how, when bad stuff happens to
foolish people, she will laugh and mock them. It’s kind of a weird section –
especially in light of the fact that the Bible has consistently mocked and
derided the mental and moral capacity of pretty much everything female up to
this point. Why would it suddenly embody wisdom as a woman, then?
There’s
an interesting theory floating about out there that the original form of this
section was about a separate goddess of wisdom (I’ve seen both Asherah and
Sophia proposed) who used to be worshipped as a companion to Yahweh, but whose
worship was later stamped out by the Yahweh cult. I didn’t dig all that deeply
into it, but it makes an interesting theory. It also makes a kind of sense in
light of the fact that the First Book of Kings tells us Solomon was chastised
by God specifically for the crime of taking up the worship of his wives’ gods.
Doesn’t seem like much of a stretch that he might have written some stuff
praising them.
On
the other hand, maybe Solomon was just being poetic and fetishizing women a bit
– he did have a thousand wives and concubines, after all.
Anyway,
the monologue by wisdom gets us to
Chapter 2, where Solomon takes up monologue about
wisdom. And not so much about what wisdom is as about how awesome it is to
have. He also talks a bit about his belief that wisdom is given by God, though
it’s not terribly clear whether he means that wisdom involves following God’s
laws or that God directly puts wisdom into you as kind of a separate thing. But
he does say that once you have wisdom, you will understand righteousness and
the value of knowledge, and how to avoid evil; stuff like that. It’s all pretty
vague fluffy stuff, but it seems to come down to a belief that wisdom is
spectacularly awesome (expressed again in a few places by describing wisdom as
a “she”), and that it consists entirely of doing what God tells you to do
without burdening your head overmuch with stuff like independent thought.
So then we get into some actual,
concrete words of advice. And there’s actually some decent stuff in there (e.g.
“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,” “Do not plan evil against
your neighbor who dwells trustingly beside you,” “Do not contend with a man for
no reason,”). But then, once Chapter 4 goes back to referring to wisdom as
“her” we get a really bizarre verse.
“Prov 4:7 The beginning of wisdom is this: get wisdom, and whatever
you get, get insight.”
Like, what the fuck does that even
mean? It starts of like it's actually going to define for us what wisdom is, but then descends immediately into gibberish! It’s word salad, completely devoid of content! This might
be excusable if the verses that followed somehow explained what it means, but
they don’t even make the attempt. Instead, we get yet another soliloquy about
how precious wisdom is, and how if you “prize her highly,” she will “honor
you,” and “place on your head a beautiful garland,” and “bestow on you a
beautiful crown.”
The rest of Chapter 5 is kind of
self-congratulatory stuff about how Solomon has taught his son wisdom and given
him wise instruction, plus a lengthy diatribe against wicked people. That gets
us into Chapter 6, which is almost entirely dedicated to a long-winded warning against
adultery. Of course, that’s pretty easy advice to give for a man who literally
has hundreds of wives and concubines to choose from at any given time. And the
framing of the warning is along the lines of warning his son not to allow an
adulterous woman to ensnare him, as if the only way a man might commit adultery
is if the woman seduces him. The long diatribe also contains
this bit of hilarity, in talking about the adulterous woman:
“Prov 6:25 Do not desire her beauty in your heart, and do not let
her capture you with her eyelashes; 26
for the price of a prostitute is only a loaf of bread, but a married woman
hunts down a precious life.”
Yes, my friends, the Biblically-declared
wisest man the world has ever known, or will ever know, advises us that if we’re
so horny we’re thinking of sleeping with another man’s wife, we should just go
to a prostitute instead. This might be shocking to you, in light of the
expressed morality of the sort of people who claim to look to the Old Testament
for rules of behavior. But as I’ve observed before, it’s pretty clear that
under Old Testament law, a man is allowed to have sex with as many women as he
likes and it won’t be considered adultery unless
some other man has a prior ownership claim on her. Solomon’s advice is
perfectly in keeping with this idea, so at least it has consistency going for
it.
Anyway, that’s probably enough for
now. Proverbs, I think, is going to be pretty tricky to write about for many of
the same reasons Psalms was. Even in this bit I’ve skipped over a lot, and I
suspect I’ll be skipping a helluva lot more before it’s done with. After all,
it’s thirty-one chapters long and I’ve only gotten through six so far. I don’t
really want to spend too many posts on it if it canbe avoided.
Until next time, everyone be well!
