Reading: Proverbs 19-21, Psalm 4

Occasionally when I am reading through the Bible, something sticks out like a sore thumb. In today’s reading we come across this little gem: Discipline your son, for there is hope; do not set your heart on putting him to death. Well. That is some advice I feel like parents may appreciate both sides of. No matter how wonky your children get, there is still hope. And Solomon understands that sometimes they make you want to kill them. There is a humorous scene in the making here, if one considers that this is set in the backdrop of wise instruction to his own son. Of course, a careful look at the rest of the story we have been following will reveal that there were, in fact, laws about persistently disobedient children being put to death, though by the community, not the parents. Not that there is any evidence of this ever being done.

Despite a few oddball proverbs like the one mentioned above, most of the wise sayings we come across in this book are ones we would immediately agree with even in our day and time. At least, at a surface level. An inheritance gained hastily in the beginning, will not be a blessing in the end matches up well with our present day wisdom: shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations. The many admonitions against sloth and laziness are well lessons well learned by many a student who oversleeps or plays video games instead of doing assignments. It turns out that the assignments aren’t going to write themselves, and the fruit of laziness is, in fact, a lack of success.

Unequal weights and unequal measures, both alike are an abomination to the Lord. I took a Church History class recently at a Seminary that leans heavily to the Baptist. When we got to 16th century England, I felt obligated to give a hard sell for how the Quakers were super legit, so I talked a lot about fair pricing, integrity, and why we don’t have a haggling economy in our country. One of my classmates had recently returned from a trip to a country where haggling for every purchase was the norm, and said it was really fun, questioning whether fixed pricing really was a good thing. In retrospect, I could have quoted this verse and felt super smug! But I didn’t, and I think that may have been the correct.

It is interesting how something so simple as the values of fair weights and measures is woven heavily into the fabric of the story in Scripture. The people of God were to have the same set of weights and measures for everyone. One was not to give a better deal to either the privileged or the destitute, or a worse one to foreigners or friends. God values equal treatment, and truth-telling. The seemingly bizarre corollary is that there have been societies that did not. These were laws, and made it into the wise sayings of Solomon, because they were not standard practice, and despite my pride in the Quaker origins of our society of fixed pricing, it is not the standard practice in many ways today. Technological advancements that allow for dynamic pricing to different shoppers, discount deals targeting particular social groups but not others. In the fragmentation of our social classes into disparate tribes, we begin to treat one another in a deeply unequal way. “Our” people get privileges “those” people do not, whether we see “our people” as privileged or oppressed, the in crowd or the out one. Equality gives way to the privilege of sameness, and all our rhetoric fails to prove otherwise.