| Solomon's wisdom: his proverbs & his God | | Date Created: Jul 26, 2006, 12:05 PM |
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I've been soaking myself in the book of Proverbs lately. Weird, huh? Here's why. Zondervan really really wants the next book to have more of a practical bent. Now I'm about as practical as a ________ [choose a simile]. Zondervan want books from a biblical experts -- but they want them on subjects like How To Love Your Family More or How To Beat Depression. Unfortunately, I'm an amateur in one and a clueless passive survivor of the other. I've spent the last 30 years learning about the New Testament, not family dynamics or neuro-chemistry.
So I'm turning to the biblical Wisdom Literature and starting with Proverbs in particular, hoping that watching the Bible itself be down-to-earth and practical will warm my heart to the idea of taking the focus off of God and putting it on the day-to-day stuff. I've gotta say that the first few days of working on it made me grow colder on the book of Proverbs rather than warmer to the practical.
I know, I know: the first section of Proverbs (chs. 1-9; which might be by an editor/collector rather than by Solomon himself -- see 25:1) is all about the theological basis for wisdom. But when you get into the bulk of the wise sayings collection of Solomon & co, it seems like it's all about experience and common sense. Crenshaw ( Introduction, p. 10) says that wisdom "believes all essential answers can be learned in experience." What a stark contrast, it seemed to me, with a truly biblical view of reality as expressed, say, in Psalm 119, where one's focus and attention is on meditating on God's words and statutes as a way of negotiating the trickiness of the path.
So I pulled one of my favourite tricks this morning: I printed out a large chunk the text in a print size too small to read comfortably, but which squeezes the text onto a single page. In this case, it's what I take to be the oldest section of the book: 10:1 - 22:16. I had to print it at like 5 point! Barely readable. But I then do skim it, highlighting in color the theme I want to check out -- I can then see at a glance how evenly distributed the theme is through the chunk. In this case I was looking for indisputable references to the person of God rather than to impersonal 'fate'. It surprised me how evenly such references were distributed and how many there were -- how integral the Lord is even to this earthy section of the book. Even better, the phrases "fear of the Lord" and "the one who fears the Lord" are also found in the beginning, middle and end of this chunk. I need to work more at understanding the mindset that Proverbs does embody, but I'm making progress.
Bibliog: Crenshaw, James L., Old Testament Wisdom: An Introduction, Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998 (revised and expanded edn). |
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