Canter Bridge

Contrary to popular belief, the sages who stand behind the biblical anthology of proverbs do not flatter themselves for having an understanding of the world all sewn up.

The maker of proverbs is a student of the world who, for all the order and pattern he discerns, is left astonished by reality’s inscrutable mysteries. On balance the proverbialist stands more in awe of the world than in control of it.

Yet this capacity to marvel must usually be detected between the lines. One sees it, for example, in the juxtaposition of proverbs that on the surface seem to contradict each other. The anthologist knows that they do not, but rather that wisdom takes the shape of working out just which truth seems more pertinent for this moment of complex reality. There is always a bit of guessing, always the need for the ‘judgment call’.

One notes the capacity for wonder also as the counterpart to the sheer audacity of making proverbs. To state things as unequivocably as the proverbs do is, in the hands of a sensitive student of the world, a reckoning with the fact that they do not always turn out to be that way. It is a pointing in a safe direction, a description of 80% of a peeled-back onion. There are always contingencies. There is always the unknown. There remains at all times the possibility of exception. Any sympathetic reader of proverbs—or for that matter, any modern user of a proverb, whether ancient or recent—knows this and does not insist upon silly absolutisms.

Yet if this understated recognition of the world’s wonder lies below the surface, between the lines, barely visible amid warp and woof in the Bible’s proverbial anthology, it occasionally blossoms to the point of articulation. One such florescence occurs amid the ‘numerical proverbs’ of the thirtieth chapter:

Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a girl.

Wisdom has its limits. Wonder abides at the seam where human understanding is joined to what cannot truly be known.

Eagles soar, the very picture of magnificent serendipity. A snake casts its curling line sideways and yet moves forward on a Spring morning’s sun-warmed rock. A ship, winds changing and sails flying, finds its way across a sea too wide for measuring and puts in to safe harbor. A man, full up with flow charts and deadlines and bills, looks into a woman’s eyes and says three words that throw it all into jeopardy.

There is no doubt that knowledge advances, explains, masters, and controls. The boundaries along which awe must make its home are shifting lines.

Yet the day when a man can no longer scribble his short list of ‘things too wonderful for me’ becomes, in a sense, the date of his death.

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The Proverbs manage to blend pragmatic hope with pessimistic appraisal of a world that suffers a nagging defect at its core. If this mix approximates to the life experience of many readers, this may in part explain the enduring appeal of this wisdom anthology, to say nothing of its instructive value.

Though wisdom’s voice does not cross over into despair, it probes the case for pessimism with a certain valor.

The leech has two daughters. ‘Give! Give!’ they cry. There are three things that are never satisfied, four that never say, ‘Enough!’: the grave, the barren womb, land, which is never satisfied with water, and fire, which never says, ‘Enough!’

As sentient human beings capable not only of suffering but of reflecting upon the fact that we do so, we find that life itself seems often to be under assault. Murphy’s Law—the stuff of modern-day folk wisdom—rings true because our wounds and bruises remind us that so many things can go wrong at any given moment, and that many of them do.

The biblical proverbialist, too, knows of a certain relentless campaign that seems to be waged at most times and at all opportunity against peace and productivity. The leech, for example, never ceases to suck a creature’s life-blood.

Grave, frustrated womb, thirsty land, consuming fire. These ubiquitous cancers keep up their incessant narrative that the world—to lapse yet again into folk wisdom—is not our home.

Yet this world, at the same time, is our home. The Proverbs know this if they know anything at all.

Here is where we sort wisdom’s long view from folly’s immediacy, declare our preference, make our choice. Here is where we know YHWH’s care or fall prey to accident in its apparent absence. Here is where we construct a family, build a home, learn to read, cradle our grandchildren, plant a tree whose fruit will delight another generation’s mouth, not our own. Here is where we invest that portion of our being that is capable of doing good.

Here is where we lean into insatiable entropy in a faintly quixotic—but YHWH-endorsed—effort to construct a world worth the trouble of it all.

Or chase the wind.

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The biblical Proverbs know the corrosive effect of things. No naivete lingers in these lines, only the most intelligent realism.

Throughout this biblical book, scarcity with honor has been recognized as an almost distinguished condition, or at least a circumstance that is preferable to familiar alternatives. Wealth, too, has been appraised as a worthy blessing so long as the heart and the conduct of the one blessed by it are well tended.

Yet the passage before us turns to assess the real danger that both poverty and riches bear within themselves. Suggestively, these economic conditions of apparent woe and weal, respectively, are placed alongside ‘falsehood and lies’ on a short list of things worth avoiding.

Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die:

Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.

Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’
Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

Although the Proverbs underscore the capacity of the wise man or woman to shape life and even to mold a desired future, this articulated fear reckons with forces that are not so easily wrestled into blessing. Finding themselves in such a place, the Proverbs loose a rare prayer to the God who can manage invisible threat.

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When the New Testament describes the ‘word’ of the Lord as ‘living’, ‘active’, and ‘potent’, it is by no means staking claim to a new truth. Rather, it aligns itself with the Hebrew Bible’s insistence that YHWH reveals his own heart and mind by speaking.

The biblical tradition privileges speaking and hearing as the principal means—though not the exclusive way—by which the Creator discloses himself to his creatures. Frequently, we are told that those who would hear face the daunting task of developing, disciplining, and refining their powers of audition. God speaks, one might say, but not everyone hears.

Proverbial wisdom places rather less emphasis upon the speaking Creator and relatively more on the capacity of the observant learner to trace his ways in creation. So it is a little surprising to find, near the end of the biblical anthology of Proverbs, this nearly prophetic assurance and warning:

Every word of God is flawless;
he is a shield to those who take refuge in him.

Arguably, this counsel comes into our hands as legacy of the non-Israelite ‘Agur’. It may be significant in this light that the word translated as ‘God’ is not the ordinary Hebrew expression (Elohim) but rather than less common Eloah. Perhaps a ‘pagan’ sage addresses Israel with a truth that familiarity may have obscured.

Every word spoken by God is without defect. His word—or, better, the speaking God—becomes for the attentive listener a secure hiding place in a world where both words and deeds too often prove hostile and even lethal.

The speech of this conversational Creator is so valuable, so sure—elsewhere we are told that it is also sweet like honey—that modification of it should not be risked. We blabber-mouthed humans too quickly add to it our accretions, bend it into our shape, make it sound like we sound when we talk.

Agur the outsider knows how dangerous such verbosity becomes when the most important thing is to listen, to hear, to be taught, in the midst of the luxury that it is to live before a God who speaks.

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