Proverbs 8 Commentary

Worship Idea: The lectionary offers a sermon series for the first month of the season of Pentecost, before it dives into the prophetic texts for most of the summer. These readings help us flesh out the gifts and attributes of the Holy Spirit.  You could consider framing up a short series using the Hebrew Scripture texts:

June 15              Proverbs 8                      The Spirit of Wisdom

June 22              I Kings 19                        The Spirit of Comfort

June 29              II Kings 2                         The Spirit of Power

July 6                  II Kings 5                         The Spirit Healing or Inclusion

Commentary:

An Anthology of Sayings: The book of Proverbs constitutes a strange genre for inclusion in the canon of Scripture.  It is full of contradictions, as Robert Alter points out regarding Proverbs 26:4-5, which reads “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourselves will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” Just what is it we are supposed to do with a fool?!  And how can we account for a blatant contradiction without undermining the authority we ascribe to the whole? To complicate matters even further, this isn’t just one anthology of desperate sayings but is, in fact, six distinct anthologies appended to one another.

The first nine chapters were likely the last ones compiled and drafted, a way of setting the tone for and making sense of what follows. These verse segments are longer and more cohesive than the one-liners to follow. Chapters 10-22 include the proverbs of Solomon, which makes sense since he is the Bible character who notably asked God for wisdom. (I Kings 3:3-15) Chapter 23 and most of chapter 24 demonstrate the universal and international flavor of wisdom with the inclusion of a close parallel to an Egyptian text of wisdom literature.  Chapters 25-29 give us a clue to the provenance of the proverbs, by citing the 8th century BC scribes who compiled the text. Note the careful choice of words: “transcribed” rather than ‘wrote” the text. The final section, chapters 30-31, seem to be 4 distinct longer wisdom poems.

It likely won’t surprise you to learn that there was some discussion about whether to include this text in the canon of Hebrew Scriptures at all.  Robert Alter summarizes, “The Book of Proverbs, then, is by no means cut from whole cloth, and consequently generalizations about its outlook and literary character will not hold for all parts of the anthology. By and large, the underlying conception of wisdom is thoroughly pragmatic.”

The “Touch Grass” Test: Given all the ways this text complicates our understanding of Scripture’s purpose, what is the advantage of including it in the canon—to say nothing of the lectionary readings for this Sunday? From this, I think we must conclude that wisdom matters to God.  Wisdom is a gift that may be supernatural gift of the Spirit but it never fails to “touch grass,” in other words to be present to the often discordant realities of this world.  The book of Proverbs doesn’t live on a shelf or in an ivory tower.  It is the way of the Spirit winding through the ordinary of our everyday lives.  And this, too, matters to God.

In fact, Proverbs 8 seems to be a particular ode to the accessibility of wisdom as we find Wisdom raising her voice from a high perch where her voice is most likely to carry, calling out from a street corner, standing by the entrance to the city, where all the traffic bottle-necks coming in and going out.  “I raise my voice to all humankind.”  There is nothing lofty or esoteric about Biblical wisdom. As Robert Alter observes, this chapter is “a celebration by Wisdom of her powers—her gift of plain and accessible discourse, the preciousness of her words, her indispensability as a guide to all who govern, the material benefits she conveys to her followers.”

However, beginning in verse 22, the scope of the text broadens cosmically.  From the ordinary accessibility of God’s wisdom to the fact that Wisdom—in the third person of the Trinity—was present at creation.  Wisdom, then, is as ancient as God’s “Let there be”s in Genesis 1 and 2. Here we might also hear resonances with John 1, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  The Holy Spirit of God is the same Spirit who hovered (I prefer “brooded” as it draws out the image of a hen on her nest.  Imagine God bringing the world to birth in such a way!) Particularly as this text is paired with the Psalm 8 hymn to creation, you can have some real fun exploring creational goodness and its generative links with the everyday application of wisdom in our lives.  As Christians, who have received the good gift of the Spirit, we too are “filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in God’s presence, rejoicing in God’s whole world and delighting in human kind.” Isn’t it striking how frequently “wisdom” and “delight” appear together?

Illustration:

For the last 2 years of her career as an elementary school teacher, my mother taught 5th grade at a Christian school. When she arrived and began reviewing her predecessor’s lesson plans, she observed that it including a Scripture memory verse quiz every week.  Now my mother is a fan of memorization, to be sure.  But she also wondered at the pacing and the level of learning that could occur with a new memory verse each week.  In other words, she wondered whether such a pace would make her students wise as well as knowledgeable of Scripture. So she instituted a different pattern: 2 weeks for each verse.  The first week was the standard memorization project.  The second week was called “Scripture Heart-ing” in which students were asked to imagine how or when this verse might be useful to them and then to creatively depict that in a diorama, skit, comic strip. In this way, she hoped to facilitate not just her students’ knowledge of Scripture but a Scripture-infused wisdom for being God’s people in the world.