Introducing the Wisdom Literature

            What shall we make of Proverbs? It is of a whole different character than the books of Moses—Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers—with their careful laying out of the way Israel’s life was supposed to be.  It is different, too, than the narratives of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles, with their urgent stories of failure and their calls for repentance.

            Proverbs belongs to that category of literature called Wisdom.  The theme of God’s wisdom winds throughout the Scriptures, but Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon are books in which wisdom is the main theme.  OT scholar Derek Kidner puts it like this: “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 teach and the often anguished questions of learner. Where the bulk of the Old Testament calls us simply to obey and to believe, this part of it…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.”

            We’ve done some of that work already, when we read Job. There we struggled through the agonized questions of the innocent sufferer, “How shall we understand suffering, especially when it happens to those who have cast their lot faithfully with the Lord?

            Here in Proverbs two things might be helpful. First, it might be helpful to see that the wisdom literature assumes a world that makes some sort of sense—in general, even if not every circumstance reveals itself to human consideration.  Perhaps it might be better to say it this way: the wisdom literature assumes a Creator God who is not arbitrary like the gods of the pagans and whose world reflects His character. Wisdom is an attempt to understand something of the mind of God.  Second, a theme through the wisdom literature is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.  This is not an exercise in speculation; wisdom assumes faith in the true God, the Creator. Wisdom assumes He is the architect, by whose design the world operates, and it assumes He is the conductor, by whom the world is brought to its final destination.

            So, God stands at the center of the wise life, and the wise person strives to understand something of the mind of God. It is an understanding seasoned by faith, God’s own words, and a lifetime’s experience.