Canter Bridge

The proverbs are both too intelligent and too discerning to walk the fast path of easy description. The reader who lingers long over this anthology of accumulated wisdom learns to detect gradations rather than bold lines. Even those proverbs which appear at first sight to traffic in simple bifurcations of human character and deportment prove, upon further inspection, to do no such thing. Rather, they find their wisdom-giving context when placed alongside dicta that seem to prove their opposite. It is in the dialectical jumble and in the context of human minds careful enough not to name themselves among the wise that true discernment takes its low-profile shape.

Sometimes a single proverb will run this risk of simple bifurcation. Yet it dodges the lethal simplification that makes truisms of such declarations rather then employing them as the potent diagnostic tools they actually long to become in human hands. It is to be expected that the dialectic between human intention and the divine arrangement of things should be a proving ground for this kind of nuanced understanding:

The human mind plans the way,
but the LORD directs the steps.

A kind of seasoned ear hears this dictum best in its more ancient English style:

A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps.

The interpretive key here is the word rendered ‘but’. The Hebrew conjunction ‘vav’ (sometimes ‘waw’) allows the reader wide discretion in detecting or constructing its meaning. ‘But’ is an adversative. It sets one statement against another. The English translators have done well in choosing the word to render the Hebrew conjunction. (more…)

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The density of the biblical proverbs allows the mistaken impression that the editor of these sayings is playing purposelessly with syllables. A quick read breezes by what it mistakes for truism when in fact a patient loitering around the saying is capable of uncovering a deeper truth.

Proverbs 15.13 is a case in point:

A glad heart makes a cheerful countenance,
but by sorrow of heart the spirit is broken.

One might suppose that a would-be poet with a penchant for lining up nice-sounding words has painted gold leaf around the mundane. ‘Happy = happy, sad = sad’ might be all this saying has to offer. Ornament trumps substance. There is, by this reading, very little here.

But the proverbialist is more intelligent than this and has accrued the right to be heard with more respect. What he is getting at is the deep inevitability of what one might call personal osmosis. What is on the inside will eventually find its way out. A man or a woman can keep up the charade of happiness only so long when the rot of sorrow is in the bones.

The proverb observes the priority of what a different era might call the life of the soul. If the soulful essence of a man trembles with joy, the face will show it, perhaps in the moment but necessarily over the long haul. By contrast, what the proverb describes as the spirit—here something like the observable genius of a particular human being—will eventually show the cracks, fissures, and seismic separations that occur when the heart, deep down, is stricken by sorrow.

The collector of biblical proverbs knows that a human being is an integral unit. One can play at contradiction, one can enact a theater of the self by which masks are changed as often as circumstances require. Yet eventually, incessantly, irrevocably, the true state of a woman finds its way to the face, where discerning onlookers note the fleeting shadow that casts itself across the eyes when the heart, deep below, is sick.

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As a compendium, the Bible is born in a resolutely communal manger.

Solitary, introspective philosophies of the kind common to, say, Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, must scrounge energetically to find biblical precedents for the lonely path they travel. In biblical perspective, the first man and woman have barely begun to wake to each other’s charms before they are commanded to make a horde of other creatures just like them. Similarly, biblical trajectories of human history tend to reach their pinnacle in sanctified mob scenes.

In short, the Bible is rarely about me. It very often is about us.

Against such a default plurality, the proverb’s realism about life’s deepest experience stands in stark relief. Those fellow travelers of a redeemed and redeeming people will nod with understanding as it reminds us that deep singularity haunts the journey, even when the din of other voices rings loudly:

The heart knows its own bitterness,
and no stranger shares its joy.

Some things, we are allowed to consider, must be carried alone. Some tears tolerate no articulate explanation, some joys explode with solitary passion.

One walks, even in a very large company, alone.

There is no escaping solitude, only a wizened embrace of its inescapable, enduring presence. This is not all we possess. Yet it is, necessarily, a portion of our inheritance. And of mine.

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