Canter Bridge

The naked cut and thrust of the biblical proverbs is sometimes too much for the pious soul to take. Given to brevity rather than to elaboration, these aphorisms often claim that the truth lies right over there rather than describe the meandering path and the two or three streams that will need to be traversed before one can safely rest one’s tired feet in that place. Such literature is not easy going for the reader who must have everything spelled out. Exhaustive surveys of the moral landscape escape the priority list of the biblical proverbialist. He has no time for nuance and is not bothered by the danger of hurt feelings. He counts on his readers knowing that some truths are best risked as absolutes.

People will sort out the details later, this anthologist seems to assume. I haven’t got time right now for complicated explanations. Cutting to the chase is his first instinct and his last.

So, in an anthology where ‘Do not fear!’ is one of the most repeated calls to security does the proverbialist dare to pass along this unpolished nugget:

Happy is the one who is never without fear,
but one who is hard-hearted will fall into calamity. (Proverbs 28:14)

Interpreters rush in to fill the perceived breach before simple souls fall into it and become bruised. The Septuagint needs to claim that a particular kind of fear—the pious variety—is in question and, as such, the prelude to blessedness:

Blessed is the man who religiously fears always: but the hard of heart shall fall into mischiefs.

Constant fear seems to this early translator an unconscionable desideratum. Surely religious deference rather than garden-variety quaking in one’s shoes is the prescription.

Even the fairly cautious New International Version supplies a precise object for this good fear, one that is not explicit in the Hebrew Text. Surely, its translators conclude, the context supplies a limited and precise fear not much different from that which seemed proper to the Septuagint translator:

Blessed is the man who always fears the LORD,
but he who hardens his heart falls into trouble.

Perhaps these translators, ancient and modern, capture the truest intent of the ancient proverb. The wider context, if it does not endorse their additions to the text, certainly renders them plausible.

Yet it is possible that such well-intentioned explanation tames a text whose unanticipated ferocity fuels its potency. Perhaps this proverb, true to its genre, probes most effectively into human experience’s deep structure—the way things work—when allowed simply to stake its immodest claim. Perhaps those who spoke this sentence in antiquity knew something of the insensible dullness that overtakes the soul of the woman or man who ceases to fear. Maybe the uncoddled capacity to fear truly is, as the verse’s architecture suggests, the opposite of hardness of heart. And, therefore, much to be preferred.

Does this proverb dare to suggest that the defenseless vulnerability to a sometimes lethal environment that is signaled to us in the rush of adrenaline or the sleepless night is a sign that we have not yet entirely sealed ourselves off from danger and the redemptive love that so often stalks just behind it? If it does, are we capable of listening?