Reading: Proverbs 10-12, Psalm 1

A penny saved is a penny earned. God helps those who help themselves. A stitch in time saves nine. All’s well that ends well. Early to rise, early to bed, makes one healthy, wealthy, and dead. Hmm. Something not quite right about that last one. As a product of modern western society, almost everyone has heard these “common sense” wise statements, and very often, Christians will attribute them to the Biblical book of proverbs. Others, more well read and eager to display their superior knowledge, will quickly point out that these axioms are not from the Bible. They will then go out and live their lives as if they were, apparently forgetting that whoever belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent. Cultural proverbs matter. They don’t exactly control the way we live, but they do reveal the cultural values. One can reverse engineer the core values of a society by reading their pithy wisdom statements.

Today, we begin reading a huge list of pithy wisdom statements. I’m not going to go through the list and comment on each one- that would be miserable for everyone. Instead, I want to point out a few things about the values that underlie these proverbs. But first, let’s not forgot what come before: a nine chapter introduction in which Solomon implores his son to begin with the knowledge and fear of the God of Israel. Only after he has insisted upon this does he begin teaching the proverbs. The proverbial statements do not stand on their own, and are not meant to be removed from their context. They are the cultural wisdom of ancient Israel, a people steeped in the books of Moses, the Kings, and the Prophets. People who chanted the Psalms on the temple steps. Who committed more than six hundred commandments to memory and meticulously lived by them. Many of them are still very true when pulled out of this world, but they may no longer be saying quite the same thing, and should certainly not be used as a justification for actions or judgments that are contrary to their surrounding context.

You may have noticed a couple of themes while reading through these sayings of Solomon. One of the most prevalent is the contrast between the wise and the foolish. The wise prosper and live long lives. The fools suffer in their condition and die young. Almost all the sayings are couplets, which declare something about the wise man, then a contrasting statement about the fool. Recalling the context of chapters one through nine, we know that Solomon’s condition for being the wise one was to fear the God of Israel. This is plopped into the proverb list itself in a couple of places: the fear of the Lord prolongs life, but the years of the wicked are short. This of course raises questions about the righteous person who dies young or the wicked one who lives a long time, to which I refer you back to the book of Job. The proverbs are general wisdom for the culture in which they arose, not universal truth statements.

Another pairing that runs through the list is the rich and the destitute. It is part of the reality of the Hebrew Scriptures that they speak of material wealth as a blessing from God, and material disaster as a curse. This is, of course, another question raised in the book of Job, which I keep referring back to because I believe it is of irreducible importance in properly reading the book of Proverbs. Of course, Solomon himself was not unaware of the tension in saying the Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the cravings of the wicked, while knowing that disaster could strike the crops of a righteous person, or that a wicked person might have a great deal of wealth. Thus he later says riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. He makes balancing statements which should lead us to question simple readings of such statements. Might the righteous not have food and yet not be hungry? Might the wicked have all they could imagine desiring yet have unquenchable cravings? They might indeed.

Within the book of Proverbs itself we can find a balancing act. Solomon takes care to present his wise sayings in the context of the fear of the God of Israel. He takes care to balance out the value of being wise and wealthy. To read and understand the wisdom of Solomon, the wisest king, will require us to read all of it as one piece. Wisdom takes more than a cultural saying, it takes the long, formative work of understanding the story behind those words.