0801049350 by Unknown

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Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Proverbs

Timothy J. Sandoval

The book of Proverbs directly addresses questions concerning ethics and the moral life. It is an anthology of “wisdom” material that includes long instructional poems (chaps. 1–9); collections of short, pithy sayings commonly thought of as “proverbs” intermingled with direct admonitions (chaps. 10–29); and other instructional material, including an acrostic poem (chaps. 30–31).

The poems in Prov. 1–9 deploy the metaphor of the “two ways” to speak of the possibilities of moral life: the way of wisdom and righteousness leads to life; the way of folly and wickedness leads to death. These poems exhort the reader to forsake the way of folly and follow the way of wisdom. Wisdom’s value, or desirability, in the poems is persistently and metaphorically highlighted in terms of material riches (e.g., 2:4; 3:14–16; 8:10–11) and erotic attraction (e.g., 4:6, 8–9; 7:4). Wisdom is more valuable than wealth and offers not merely literal, material riches, but the “enduring wealth” of virtue (8:18) and is personified for the book’s presumed original young, male audience as a desirable and marriageable woman (Yoder).

Yet, Proverbs recognizes that life’s two divergent paths may not always appear so different from each other; it speaks of the enduring value of wisdom’s way, but also of the powerful (if superficial) attraction of the way of folly and wickedness. The “sinners” who follow this way, for example, also hold out a promise of (ill-gotten) “precious wealth” to the one who would join them (1:10–19). Likewise, Prov. 1–9 not only personifies wisdom as a virtuous and desirable woman; these chapters also speak of another desirable woman: the strange or foreign woman, who, on a literal reading of the text, is best understood as an adulteress, potentially able to seduce the addressee (e.g., 2:16–19; 5:3–23). The adulteress, however, is symbolically linked with folly, which is later also personified as a woman (9:13–18). Together, the strange woman and Woman Folly constitute the mirror image of Woman Wisdom (9:1–6; cf. 1:20–21; 7:10–12). They represent all that belongs to the dangerous, wrong way.

By deploying images of desirable women and valuable material wealth in relation to the ways of wisdom and folly, Prov. 1–9 undertakes the moral task of training the desires of its addressee along the better of the two paths. Although wealth and erotic fulfillment are pleasing and can afford temporary advantage, neither, according to the sages of Proverbs, is ultimately as desirable as wisdom. The pursuit of these and other lesser goods, the text suggests, ought to be subordinated to the pursuit of wisdom and appropriately ordered by wisdom’s virtues.

The precise content of the virtues that constitute wisdom’s way, however, is only minimally sketched in Prov. 1–9. The short sayings, or “proverbs,” and admonitions of Prov. 10–29, by contrast, address a spectrum of topics relevant to daily life that together comprised the themes of moral discourse in ancient Israelite wisdom traditions: right and wrong speech, diligence and slothfulness, wealth and poverty, the rich and the poor, and so forth.

Folklorists who have studied the proverbs of a range

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