Part 4—The Southern Kingdom
and
What They’re Not (Part 2)
• Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. • Truth that is told with bad intent may beat any lie that you can invent. A Biblical example is 16:3, “Commit thy works unto the Lord and thy thoughts shall be established.” In Hebrew “your works” and “your thoughts” actually rhyme. To reflect this in English we might translate it this way: • Commit to the Lord all you have wrought, and He will establish your every thought. There is often more of this kind of poetic device in the Hebrew—consonance, assonance, and alliteration—than English translations show. “Poetic” may refer to a balanced structure. • To be humble to Superiors is duty; to Equals, courtesy; to Inferiors, nobleness. In Biblical proverbs, this usually takes the form of parallelism (see the Jan/Feb 2012 At a Glance). “Poetic” means condensed, compact; after all, brevity is the soul of wit! • Character is what you are in the dark.
father like son” is a generally reliable observation, but it certainly does not hold true in every case. The phrase “except after c” does not negate the general validity of the rule “i before e,” but it does prevent the general rule from being an absolute rule in all cases. Likewise, exceptions prevent a proverb from being an absolute, but exceptions do not negate the general rule or the validity of the general observation. More on this later as well.
Proverbs are conditioned by culture and reflect a worldview. The worldview of Proverbs is firmly rooted in the Pentateuch. For example, note Proverbs’ echo of these foundational theological truths from Genesis. Genesis Truth
Proverbs Echo
God created the world.
3:19, 20; 8:27–29
God made man.
14:31
God is man’s Judge.
5:21, 22
But the wisdom of Proverbs reflects, even more specifically, the worldview of Deuteronomy. For example, compare the passages in the following chart.
• Open rebuke is better than secret love (27:5).
Proverbs
Deuteronomy
“Poetic” means simultaneously simple yet insightful. It means particularity combined with universality.
19:17
15:7, 8, 10
20:10, 23
25:13, 16
20:22
32:35
Proverbs are general observations. Proverbs are more descriptive and instructive than directive; they often counsel but rarely command. A proverb may occasionally be expressed in the form of a command, but it is conspicuously rare. “General truths are the stock in trade in Proverbs” (Garrett). In Proverbs 1–9 commands leap out all over; but remember (from the previous column), this section is wisdom discourse, not proverbs in the technical sense. To see the difference, begin reading in Proverbs 10 and see how many commands you can find. Out of the 375 proverbs proper from chapters 10–22, less than ten (2%) are phrased as a directives (16:3; 19:27; 20:13, 16, 22; 22:6, 10, 28). More on this below. Proverbs admit exceptions. Like the exceptions that we instinctively understand when it comes to non-Biblical proverbs, even Biblical proverbs admit exceptions, not because they are fallible but because they are proverbs. “Like FrontLine • March/April 2012
This feature alone underscores the superlative reliability of Biblical proverbs over secular proverbs, because they are consistent with an infallible worldview. Portable, poetic, general, and culturally conditioned—a proverb is a truth in capsule form, validity combined with portability. Not Everything in Proverbs Is a Proverb Not everything in the Book of Proverbs is a “proverb.” In discussing “proverbs” I am speaking of technical proverbs as defined above, and so limiting the focus to the most common form of wisdom literature—the brief, pithy saying that goes by several names (maxim, aphorism, adage, truism). Proverbial literature is, of course, much broader than this. Continued on next page
29