Canter Bridge

Ah, to be young!

What glory. What fun. How awful.

Biblical wisdom is not as quick to glorify youth as we are, besotted by tan lines and taut skin. But neither does wisdom deny the splendor of the young. It gives them their due, in this case admiring the strength of young men.

The glory of young men is their strength, but the splendor of old men is their gray hair. (Proverbs 20:29 ESV)

At the same time, biblical wisdom is not satisfied by monochrome obsession with any one of life’s stages. As it admires youth’s undeniable beauty—who would want to deny it!—wisdom knows too the dignity of old age, in this proverb the splendor of an old man’s gray hair.

The Hebrew text has no conjunction between the two lines of this proverb. Uncharacteristically, the English Standard Version inserts one. It’s an adversative conjunction—the English word ‘but’—meaning that something in the second line runs against the claim of the first line. A contradiction, gentle or stark, is in play.

The New Revised Standard Version does the same, in its attempt to tease out the precise claim on reality that the proverbialist is making.

The glory of youths is their strength, but the beauty of the aged is their gray hair. (Proverbs 20:29 NRSV)

One senses in this provision of a word a slight defensiveness. That is, these two translations seem to insist that things are not as they might seem at first. Not only the young make an impression. The old have some beauty, too.

This is probably not necessary.

Other English translations render the cadence of things in Hebrew more economically, and probably rightly:

The glory of youths is their strength; The majesty of old men is their gray hair. (Proverbs 20:29 JPS)

The glory of young men is their strength, gray hair the splendor of the old. (Proverbs 20:29 NIV)

By these lights, the proverb simply recognizes that two stages of life—a very early and a very late stage standing in for the entire lifespan of human beings—have their own glory.

The difference is subtle, but worth considering.

Wisdom is open-eyed. It takes in as full a range of observation as sense and brain can process. It resists easy reductionistism and glories in penetrating as far as possible into how things really are. It will not dumb down life’s complexity just so everybody can understand.

Only when wisdom and folly are opposed to each other does it become possible to sort life and lives into categories of better and worse. Outside that fundamental dichotomy, we run our course on a level and nuanced field.

Youth is strong, but hampered by all that is not yet known and the danger of self-absorption.

Old age is beautiful, but all too familiar with the bent back, the aching legs, the enfeebled mind.

‘Every man you meet is fighting a battle’, a mentor once taught me when it was still possible to hear ‘man’ as ‘man and woman’.

He was right, though he might say today if given the chance that ‘Every man, woman, boy, and girl has it good. And has it so very hard.’

We are all different. Yet so very much the same.