Canter Bridge

Whether the intended audience of the biblical Proverbs is comprised of the sons and daughters of the court or whether these collected dicta are for the instruction of sons and daughters in the home, the sayings of the wise display a certain concern with the dignity of leaders. Royalty, for the sages, is no laughing matter. The nation’s fate depends to some considerable degree upon justice and mercy working their way into the conscience and conduct of those who hold the levers of power in their hand.

A democratic age squirms at the thought. The wise contemplate the matter with serene realism.

The mother of a certain Lemuel reflects this concern. No tea-totaler, it would seem, she is nevertheless clear-eyed about the damaging effects of strong drink as well as sanguine about its pain-killing qualities.

It is not for kings, O Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine, or for rulers to desire strong drink; or else they will drink and forget what has been decreed, and will pervert the rights of all the afflicted. Give strong drink to one who is perishing, and wine to those in bitter distress; let them drink and forget their poverty, and remember their misery no more. (Proverbs 31:4–7 NRSV)

Lemuel’s mother knows that behavior located within the gray zones of the ethical map can be tolerated when the hapless engage in it. But when the influential meddle in such stuff, bad things happen. If no man is an island, women and men born to influence cannot imagine themselves to be even a peninsula.

Too much is at stake.

The prudent mother of Lemuel cannot bear to imagine that the relatively modest pleasure of strong drink should end up perverting the rights of the oppressed because the addled brain of an inebriated prince can no longer recall what he’s been taught about justice and its carcinogenic alternatives.

No Bible-thumping here, no jeremiads, no screaming in the street. Just the real-world discernment that those who lead give up certain prerogatives for a quite simple reason: too much is at stake.

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Careful students of the world come to understand that truth is not always obvious. A superficial scanning of things and circumstances will produce a superficial understanding of them. There runs the herd. A herd provides lots of company, but it is usually mindless.

Although the proverbial anthology insists that the community is the best custodian of understanding—or, more accurately, that there is no wisdom without respectful attention paid to the community and its accrued wisdom—the Proverbs also commend a certain independence of mind. A recent comment on this blog came from a man whose personal motto (digitized, as we do these days), is ‘think hard, think well’.

He might have been summarizing one of the key commitments of biblical wisdom.

Such careful observers—call them independent if we must—know that one must look much deeper than appearances in order to mine the world for its well-hidden nuggets of understanding. Wisdom often turns the table on the casual observer, particularly when he is sure he knows what he thinks he knows. If the voice of the sage does not always address such a person roughly—’You fool!’—it at least offers him an exhortation: ‘Look again!’

Four are among the tiniest on earth, Yet they are the wisest of the wise: Ants are a folk without power, Yet they prepare food for themselves in summer; The badger is a folk without strength, Yet it makes its home in the rock; The locusts have no king, Yet they all march forth in formation; You can catch the lizard in your hand, Yet it is found in royal palaces. (Proverbs 30:24–28 JPS)

The key to this numbered proverb lies in the paradoxical description of its four little creatures. On the one hand, they are very small and, therefore, unlikely sources of understanding. On the other, these critters are presented as ‘the wisest of the wise’ or ‘exceptionally wise’. One might well live out one’s life without looking to such tiny creatures for qualities of character that often elude human beings.

That would be a wasted opportunity to learn. And to live.

Ants, badgers, locusts, lizards. These pull off feats of foresight, security, organization, and access that would be the envy of any thoughtful human being, to say nothing of his community.

Yet because they are small they pass unnoticed, unobserved, and so their lesson is lost.

Unless, by good fortune, one falls under the instruction of the sages, who remind us often and patiently not to be too sure that we know nor too confident that we can anticipate from what corner, person, or thing wisdom will next make itself available.

And then, by strenuously practiced discipline, to look again. More carefully, this time.

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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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