Canter Bridge

The biblical proverbs do not deal in sentimentalities. Concrete practicalities are the order of the day in this compendium of well-processed counsel.

So pragmatic is the tone of the discourse and so few the references to God and the liturgy he is assumed to require that some scholars have reached for the adjective ‘secular’ to describe the kind of wisdom that in these pages makes its offer.

Still, that turning back to which the more familiar word ‘repentance’ refers is hardly absent, as life lived by this counsel is life worked out in YHWH’s very presence:

If you have been foolish, exalting yourself,
or if you have been devising evil,
put your hand on your mouth.

To exalt oneself is the cardinal sin of the wisdom or ‘sapiential’ literature. It is arguably the spring from which poisoned waters make their long, liquid journey downstream. To devise evil is more generic. It too suffers by its association with arrogance, becoming almost its synonym. Devising evil is the implementation, one might say, of the arrogant heart’s self-exalted posture.

This is the bad news that biblical realism consistently holds before us like a morning’s mirror. It seldom goes away when asked.

The proverb brings also its good news: for a while at least, both arrogance and its schemes can be stopped by that sudden, adrenaline-flushed placing of the hand over a guilty mouth, that ‘What have I done?’.

That way, for the fool, lies wisdom. While this road leads to a ditch in the cold, dark night, there ahead on that one stands a house, its lights still burning. The door had not been locked.