Introduction to Proverbs

Title and authorship

The first verse names Solomon, and the book then goes on to name other people as well. This is unusual and it is worth taking at face value. Proverbs is a collection, it says so about itself, and it labels its own sections.

The headings are these. The proverbs of Solomon opens the book Proverbs 1:1 and opens the great collection at Proverbs 10:1. The words of the wise introduces a further section Proverbs 22:17, and these also are sayings of the wise introduces another Proverbs 24:23. Then a heading with a date in it: These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out Proverbs 25:1. The last two chapters carry two more names, Agur the son of Jakeh Proverbs 30:1 and King Lemuel, who is passing on the revelation which his mother taught him Proverbs 31:1.

So the book presents itself as Solomonic at its core and edited into its present shape later, and the editors are named in the text rather than inferred from it. That there was a large body of Solomonic material to draw on is stated elsewhere: he spoke three thousand proverbs and his songs were a thousand and five 1 Kings 4:32. The book contains a few hundred, which means somebody selected.

The two closing voices are the most interesting authorial fact in it. Agur confesses at the outset that he has not learned wisdom Proverbs 30:2–3, and Lemuel's chapter is credited not to the king but to his mother. A book that begins with the wisest king in Israel's history ends with a man who says he is ignorant and a woman whose name is not recorded.

Date

The book supplies its own chronology in a single verse, and it covers two and a half centuries. The Hezekiah heading states that the men of that king copied out a further collection of Solomon's proverbs Proverbs 25:1. Solomon reigned in the tenth century; Hezekiah in the late eighth. The material is therefore older than the book, and the book is at least as late as Hezekiah's reign.

That gives three fixed points and no more. The sayings of chapters 10 to 22 belong with Solomon. The sayings of chapters 25 to 29 belong with Solomon and were gathered by Hezekiah's scribes. Everything else — the discourses of chapters 1 to 9, the two collections headed the words of the wise, Agur and Lemuel — carries no date at all.

Nothing in the book's use depends on placing them. A proverb about a lazy man or a false balance is not anchored to a reign the way an oracle is, and the collection does not date its sayings because the sayings do not need dating. That is a feature of the genre rather than a gap in the record.

What can be said with confidence is that Proverbs is the deposit of a long process. Sayings were composed, remembered, collected, copied by a later king's officials, joined to material from other hands, and given an introduction. The book's own headings describe that process without embarrassment, and its authority is presented as resting on the material rather than on a single moment of composition.

Backgrounds

The setting throughout is a household with a son in it. My son occurs more than twenty times, and the instruction is repeatedly credited to two people: listen to your father's instruction, and don't forsake your mother's teaching Proverbs 1:8. Whatever else Proverbs is, it is a curriculum for raising a particular kind of person, and both parents are named as teaching it.

The world assumed is a settled agricultural society with towns, courts and markets. Fields are plowed in season and harvests come in Proverbs 20:4. Boundary stones mark inherited land and can be moved at night Proverbs 22:28. Cases are heard in the gate and witnesses can be bought. Merchants weigh goods, and the book returns again and again to the scales — a false balance is an abomination and a just weight is his delight Proverbs 11:1. These are the details of ordinary economic life, and they are where most of the book's moral energy goes.

A royal court stands behind part of it. Several sayings are addressed to men who will stand before rulers, on how to behave at a king's table and how a king's favor works Proverbs 23:1–3 Proverbs 25:6–7. The training of officials is a plausible original setting for some of this material, and the book itself says its purpose includes giving sound answers to the ones who sent you Proverbs 22:21.

The international character of the genre is worth stating plainly, because the book does not hide it. Collections of practical sayings were made across the ancient world, and Proverbs shares the form. It also includes voices from outside Israel's line — Agur and Lemuel are not Israelite kings or prophets. What the book does with the shared form is the distinctive thing: it puts the fear of Yahweh at the head of it, and the whole collection is arranged under that heading.

Theology and purpose

Proverbs states its own purpose, which almost no biblical book does. Six lines at the opening set out what it is for: to know wisdom and instruction, to discern words of understanding, to receive instruction in wise dealing and in righteousness and justice and equity, to give prudence to the simple and knowledge to the young, to let the wise increase in learning, and to understand a proverb and the riddles of the wise Proverbs 1:2–6. Two audiences are named there and they are opposite. The book is for the beginner who has no judgment, and for the man who already has some and wants more.

The seventh line is the motto: The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge Proverbs 1:7. It is repeated in almost the same words at the close of the opening section Proverbs 9:10, and the pair frames everything between. What the word beginning carries is not that fear comes first and is then left behind, but that it is the starting point without which the rest does not follow. A book largely made of practical advice about money, work, speech and sex begins by saying that none of it can be got right from the outside.

The most distinctive theological claim is that wisdom is built into the world rather than invented by anyone. Yahweh founded the earth by wisdom and established the heavens by understanding Proverbs 3:19, and the long poem of chapter 8 has wisdom present when the foundations were marked out. What follows from that is the book's working assumption: the moral order and the physical order come from the same hand, so that living wisely is a matter of going with the grain of what is actually there.

And the book's promises must be read as what they are, which is proverbs. A proverb states a general truth in compressed form. It is not a law, and it is not a guarantee. The diligent hand does tend to rule and the lazy one to end in poverty, and the book says so — but Scripture also contains a man who lost everything while blameless Job 1:8 and a preacher who watched the righteous perish in their righteousness Ecclesiastes 7:15. Those books are not corrections of this one. They stand beside it, and reading Proverbs as a set of promises produces exactly the theology Job's friends argued and God rejected Job 42:7.

The two ways run through the whole. Two paths, two houses, two women, two invitations, two ends. Wisdom and Folly both call from the high places of the city and both invite the simple in Proverbs 9:3–4 Proverbs 9:14–16, using nearly identical words. The book's account of the choice is that it is genuinely available, that it is made early, and that it is made by somebody who cannot yet tell the two voices apart. That is why the instruction is addressed to a son.

Additional notes

How to read a proverb, and the book proves the point itself. Two consecutive verses give opposite instructions: Don't answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him, and then Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes Proverbs 26:4–5. They are placed side by side deliberately. Neither is a rule; each states a real risk, and the reader has to judge which risk is live. A collection that puts those two verses in that order is telling its reader what kind of book it is.

The sayings in chapters 10 to 29 are mostly not arranged by subject. They are best taken in runs, with each run read as a group and its recurring concerns drawn out, because that is what the material supports. Where a genuine cluster exists — the sluggard sayings of chapter 26, the numerical sayings of chapter 30 — it is treated as a cluster.

Wisdom is personified as a woman throughout chapters 1 to 9, calling in the streets, building a house and setting a table. Chapter 8 extends this to her presence at creation. What that passage is doing, and what it is not doing, is set out where it falls; the short form is that a personification in a poem is being read as a personification, that the New Testament's language about Christ and wisdom is real, and that the passage is not the place to settle a question it never raises.

The last poem is an acrostic. The twenty-two verses of Proverbs 31:10–31 begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet in order, one to a verse. The form is not visible in translation, and it matters for reading the poem: a complete alphabet is a way of saying that the subject has been covered from end to end.

Where a saying turns on a Hebrew term or an obsolete practice, the sense is given plainly. Several proverbs depend on customs a modern reader does not share — surety given by striking hands, the moving of a boundary stone, gleaning rights, the gate as a courtroom — and these are explained where they occur rather than assumed.

Outline

How the book is built

The fear of Yahweh, opening and closing the discourses inclusio 1:7-9:10

• A 1:7 The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge — set as the motto immediately after the six lines that state the book's purpose.
• A′ 9:10 The fear of Yahweh is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding — restated at the point where the two invitations are set side by side.

The first nine chapters are a continuous instruction, and they are bracketed by one sentence stated twice. It opens the book as the fear of Yahweh being the beginning of knowledge, and it closes the section as the fear of Yahweh being the beginning of wisdom, with the knowledge of the Holy One as understanding. The pairing is the text's own: the same formula, the same position relative to the material, and the two halves of the opening verse's vocabulary — knowledge and wisdom — distributed across the two statements. What the frame does is govern how everything inside it is read. Between the two verses lie ten father-to-son discourses and three speeches by personified Wisdom, none of which is offered as advice that works on its own terms. And because the second statement stands at the head of the chapter where Wisdom and Folly issue nearly identical invitations, the frame closes precisely where the reader is asked to choose.

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