Canter Bridge

The proverbs teach, more often than not, by laying beside each other parallel realities that normally pass unnoticed. Practical wisdom resides in the similar patterns that link what we customarily consider independent realms of life, nature, and the like.

Take pressing, for example, as Proverbs 30.33 does. The New Revised Standard Version is to be commended for consistently translating the three-times-present Hebrew word מיץ (miyts) as pressing. Other translators have felt the need to overcome the potential monotony of the thing and so have risked obscuring the neat parallel upon which the proverb depends.

For as pressing milk produces curds,
and pressing the nose produces blood,
so pressing anger produces strife.

Pressing a thing that might otherwise be left alone consistently produces a result that, by most angles of vision, is not inherent in the thing itself. Pressing is thus transformative, whether for good or for ill. (more…)

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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. (more…)

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