The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes

Derek Kidner

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780830896417
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." In the Wisdom literature of the Bible we first hear the cool voice of a teacher calling us to think--to think hard and humbly. "How long will fools hate knowledge?" cries Wisdom in the book of Proverbs. Then in Job comes the anguished voice of the questioner, earnest enough to seek answers, honest enough to doubt easy ones. In Ecclesiastes the chastened tone of the Preacher warns of the vanity of all life under the sun. Sensitive to both literary form and theological content, Derek Kidner introduces Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes, explaining their basic character and internal structure. He also summarizes and evaluates the wealth of modern criticism focused on each book. Looking at all three books together, Kidner shows how their many voices compare, contrast and ultimately give a unified view of life. Kidner extends his analysis to include Ecclesiasticus and The Wisdom of Solomon from the Apocrapha, and he reprints excerpts from non-Israelite works that parallel the three major books treated.

1

A meeting of minds

A distinctive voice

There comes a point in the Old Testament when the pilgrim is free to stop and take a long look round. He has had a well-marked path to follow, and still it stretches on ahead. But now he must relate it to the world at large, to the scene spread out on every side: from what lies right at his feet (shrewdly pointed out in Proverbs) to what is barely visible at the horizon – the dark riddle of how the world is governed (the book of Job) and how it should be valued (Ecclesiastes).

‘Now’, says his guide, ‘you see what sense it made to come the way we did – what false trails we avoided, what deathtraps!’

‘All the same’, replies the pilgrim, ‘there is plenty that I don’t see; a lot that seems even wrong and pointless. Look at this, for instance,. . . and this. . ..’

In other words, in the Wisdom books the tone of voice and even the speakers have changed. The blunt ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘shalt not’ of the Law, and the urgent ‘Thus saith the LORD’ of the Prophets, are joined now by the cooler comments of the teacher and the often anguished questions of the learner. Where the bulk of the Old Testament calls us simply to obey and to believe, this part of it (chiefly the books we have mentioned, although wisdom is a thread that runs through every part) summons us to think hard as well as humbly; to keep our eyes open, to use our conscience and our common sense, and not to shirk the most disturbing questions.

The value of this approach

Simply as a form of teaching, this has something special for us. The lecture or the sermon, with its one-way flow, can make its points tidily and at leisure; but a lesson that draws the hearers into answering and asking, into working things out painfully, may well get further into the mind than any discourse, even if at times it deliberately leaves many questions unresolved.

Still more importantly, this demand for thought presupposes a world that answers to thought. Not, to be sure, one which we can hope to master with our finite minds; but that is our limitation, not the world’s; for if it is a creation, and the product of perfect wisdom, it will be in principle intelligible. So even when the arrogance of human thought has to be rebuked (as we shall see), the Old Testament makes no retreat into notions of divine caprice; still less, of ‘a tale told by an idiot’ or by nobody at all. Instead, it sees God’s wisdom expressed and echoed everywhere – except where man, the rebel, has presumed to disagree and to disrupt the pattern. This stamp of reason upon all God’s works is something that the poets sing about with eloquence:

Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?. . .

Who has put wisdom in the clouds,

or given understanding to the mists?

Jb. 38:33,36.

Even the stork in the heavens

knows her times;

and the turtledove, swallow, and crane

keep the time of their coming;

but my people know not

the ordinance of the LORD. . ..

Lo, they have rejected the word of the LORD,

and what wisdom is in them?

Je. 8:7,9.

The LORD by wisdom founded the earth;

by understanding he established the heavens. . .

Pr. 3:19.

To put this in more prosaic terms, what is implied here is a single system, a universe; and what is invited is the study of it in a spirit of humility, so that we may take our due place within it willingly and intelligently. Certainly one way of exalting the Creator’s glory is to dwell on his untrammelled choice of action, which makes all our calculations provisional:

Our God is in the heavens;

he does whatever he pleases

Ps. 115:3.

And this, as Y. Kaufmann has reminded us, is no truism: it stands in utter contrast to the pagan view of deities who are limited by a pre-existent world-stuff or set of primeval powers, which are ‘as independent and primary as the gods themselves’, or are even the very source of their existence. ‘To be sure,’ adds Kaufmann, ‘paganism has personal gods who create and govern the world of men. But a divine will, sovereign and absolute, which governs all and is the cause of all being – such a conception is unknown.’1

Yet the Old Testament ascribes to the sovereign LORD more than freedom. His creation coheres. Instead of a world order which is the unstable product of rival wills, as the mythologies suggest, and is therefore subject to the arbitrary pressures of magico-religious manipulation, the Old Testament sets the world before us as the harmonious composition of a single mind:

O LORD, how manifold are thy works!

In wisdom hast thou made them all.

Ps. 104:24.

This is the faith in which the natural world can be confidently studied, whether by a simple observation of its patterns and its everyday sequences, such as are noted in Proverbs, or by the more rigorous techniques of modern science, both of which assume that reason can be fruitfully applied to the phenomena before us. It was no misuse of Scripture to inscribe over the entrance of not only the old Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge but, in the 1970s, of the New Cavendish as well (this time in English, not Latin!), the words of Psalm 111:2 (AV),

The works of the LORD are great,

sought out of all them that have pleasure therein.

In this spirit Solomon, who had prayed for wisdom for the task of government and for discernment ‘between good and evil’ (1 Ki. 3:9), did not confine his thinking to these professionally useful realms, but ‘spoke of trees. . . also of beasts, and of birds, and of reptiles, and of fish’ (1 Ki. 4:33 [5:13, Heb.]). This makes common ground with the interests of all men. The presence of this kind of material in Scripture invites the man of God to study his whole environment, not simply that part of it which bears directly on the covenant or on morality. In these books he is aware of his fellow men as human beings rather than as Israelites or Gentiles; and when he turns to other creatures he can enjoy them with an artist’s eye, noting for example their grace of movement or their skill in using their native elements. So he is taking God’s creatorship as seriously as his redemption, and is giving due weight to the solidarity between ‘all parts of his dominion’, material and immaterial, measuring all alike by the single concept of wisdom – from the universe itself down to the behaviour of a colony of ants, or of a child or a courting couple, or of a buyer and seller doing business.

This has an immediate bearing on – at one extreme – the exclusive pietism which is a recurrent tendency within Christianity; and at another extreme, on the absolute autonomy which secularists claim for human culture – two opposite reactions against the crown rights of Deity, yet not dissimilar in their effects. The former would shut God in to the narrow circle of worship, ethics, evangelism and eschatology; the latter would shut God out of nine-tenths of the human scene, allowing him no voice in sociology, education, art or science, and allowing these realms no benefit of the Creator’s mind and judgment.

The stimulus of Solomon

The opening of windows and doors towards the world at large, which Solomon’s approach implies, did actually take place quite noticeably in his reign, which seems to have had something of the novelty and excitement that we associate with the Renaissance.2 Israel’s mental horizons, and in a sense her physical ones as well, were expanding. The king’s ships, off and away into the Indian Ocean for three years at a time (1 Ki. 10:22), were trading, it seems, down the coast of Africa and across to India, returning with exotic cargoes of ‘gold, silver, ivory, apes, and peacocks’ (or baboons?); while overland the flow of goods was equally impressive and very lucrative to a kingdom that sat astride the trade routes (see, e.g., 1 Ki. 10:14–15, 29). With prosperity came the leisure and the fine materials to enrich the arts, and Solomon was quick to enlist the skills of foreigners wherever Israelite abilities fell short, whether in forestry or in the decorative arts or in seamanship (1 Ki. 5:6; 7:13–45; 9:27). In administration, too, there is some reason to think that Egyptian experience was drawn on for the task of running the greatly expanded kingdom that Solomon inherited from his father.3 Everywhere there was a whirl of new activity.

Most significant of all, for our theme, was the spread of Solomon’s intellectual fame, which drew the world to his door. The Queen of Sheba was but one of this stream of learned visitors, intent on trying out his erudition and wit. The queen’s ‘hard questions’ were probably riddles in both senses of the word (Heb. ḥîḏâ) – at one level the kind of puzzle which Samson set his wedding guests in Judges 14:12ff., not unlike the teasing clues of a modern crossword; and at another level the dark enigmas of life, such as the riddle of unpunished evil which Psalm 49:4 (5, Heb.) sets out to answer. To engage in these mind-sharpening encounters with all comers was to bring one’s beliefs out into the open. It implied that the truth one lived by was valid through and through, and that its writ ran everywhere; it also suggested that shared ground existed between the truly wise of any nation. Accordingly we shall come across sayings and concerns that were common property of Israelite and foreign sages; and we may notice that in 1 Kings 4:30–31 Solomon’s wisdom is compared with that of the East and of Egypt, as well as that of his fellow Israelites. True, he outshone them all; but there was a basis of comparison between them. It was because his wisdom surpassed rather than by-passed theirs, that they flocked to hear him.

Wisdom’s ‘native wood-notes’

Incalculable as was Solomon’s part in this cultural explosion, he was not starting from an intellectual void. Israel, like any other people, had its store of native wit: its sage old characters and clever young men; its sharp sayings and its more elaborate and oblique ones. A few of these happen to break surface here and there in the narratives: there are the four names in 1 Kings 4:31, from Ethan to Darda, obviously famous in their day; there were professonal counsellors such as Ahithophel and Hushai his rival (2 Sa. 15:12 – 17:23). More informally, there were star performers in their own localities: the crafty Jonadab (2 Sa. 13:3), the wise woman of Tekoa whom we meet in 2 Samuel 14, and even a city that was noted for its collective wisdom (Abel, 2 Sa. 20:18). An occasional proverb flashes out: from David to Saul in 1 Samuel 24:13, on the act that reveals the man; or from Ahab to Ben-hadad on (in our terms) counting one’s chick...