The beginning of wisdom
In which we begin - very, very slowly - to work our way through the aphoristic Proverbs.
Proverbs 10:1 The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is a sorrow to his mother.
Stating the obvious?
We begin this series of reflections with what might seem like the most banal bit of common sense. Wise kids make their dads happy; foolish kids make their mums want to tear their hair out. It hardly seems worth saying. Which parent hasn’t swelled up with pride as they see their little one master a new skill, or been kind to another child at the playgroup, or win a certificate at the school prize-giving ceremony? Conversely, which parent hasn’t spent anxious hours worrying about the bad habit their child is developing, or the bad company they’re keeping, or the bad choices they’re making? Is this proverb doing anything more than stating the obvious?
Perhaps. Sometimes the obvious needs stating, if it’s not obvious to everyone. The son who is addressed at the very beginning of the book (1:8ff) is being urged to choose the path of wisdom and not the path of folly, and he needs to know the consequences of both; and being a parent has convinced me that everything - everything - needs spelling out to children. (“No, you can’t ingest peanut butter nasally. No, it’s not because no-one’s ever tried it before. Look, just…”)
But we will struggle to understand this proverb aright if we read it through modern eyes. A cynical modern observer might even suggest that telling a stroppy teenager that his behaviour is turning his mother’s hair grey has never been a particularly effective strategy. So perhaps this statement of the obvious isn’t so obvious at all. We’ll have to dig deeper into the thought-world of the Bible to make sense of it.
What is wisdom anyway?
Proverbs 1-9 is topped and tailed with the famous foundational statement on true biblical wisdom:
Proverbs 1:7 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.
Proverbs 9:10 The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.
The wisdom found in Proverbs is stunningly wide-reaching, deeply practical, and often seems applicable independent of any particular religious persuasion. Do you need to be a worshipper of Yahweh to appreciate the truth that too much of a good thing can make you sick (25:16)? Or that if you oversleep and don’t turn up to work, you’ll probably struggle to make ends meet (20:13)? Indeed, many of the Proverbs seem to be lifted from other wisdom traditions,1 an implicit acknowledgement that wise living is not the sole preserve of the Israelite. And yet the collection of Proverbs into one book, with the insistence on the fear of the Lord front and centre, puts all of this “worldly wisdom” under the same rubric, for at least two reasons that I can see.
The guiding principle
First, the fear of the Lord seems to be presented as a guiding principle for the rest of the wisdom in the book. That is to say, one’s relations with the world and its people are contingent on one’s relation with God. Living wisely in the world is living wisely in God’s world - a world formed by his word and sustained by his command - and therefore to truly know how to navigate life one must know and respect the one who designed it. Although wisdom can be found outwith Yahweh’s people, yet the source of such wisdom must ultimately be traced back to him. Ιn Cornelius Van Til’s memorable phrase, the non-believer who lives wisely trades in “borrowed capital”, which only logically coheres within the worldview whence it originated. Often the logic of wisdom demands fear of the Lord at the centre, without which “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
For example, take the sluggard who lazes around and shies away from work. We might see the wisdom of that purely from the perspective of self-preservation - if you work hard and earn money, you’re likely to live a longer and healthier life. Or perhaps we see it from the perspective of the wider community - if you work hard, you will benefit your “tribe”, and your standing among your peers may increase. But what if you don’t care about those things? What if a short life full of ease and self-indulgence is good enough? What if you don’t give a fig for your tribe and you’re happy to “eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (Isaiah 22:13)? Without the overarching life-giving authority of Yahweh, who are we to say that a person should aim to live long and serve others? Without the certainty of final judgement and accountability, why not laze around and enjoy a short, self-indulgent life?
“No!” he said, a little sullenly, but stoutly; “I’m not sorry. And it wasn’t folly at all! It was simply glorious!” Toad of Toad Hall2
The core component
Second, the fear of the Lord is the core component of wisdom, without which even the wisest atheist will be ultimately found to be a fool. In the early chapters of Proverbs, both wisdom and foolishness are inescapably intertwined around relationship with God. To cite just a few a examples:
adultery is the abandonment of a covenant made with God (2:17);
wise living leads to favour with God (3:4);
the Lord’s fatherly discipline is one way wisdom is learned (3:11-12);
both the blessing of wisdom and the curse of folly have their source in the personal activity of the covenant God (3:33).
Within the early chapters of Proverbs, the blessing of God’s favour is largely equated with “life working well”, with a distinctly covenantal flavour. For example, the wise will receive long life in the land (2:21) and nice full barns (3:10) - a clear echo of the covenant blessings of Deuteronomy 28:8.
The greater blessing
But there are hints that the wisdom found in the fear of the Lord has an even greater blessing in view - via the strange use of the metaphor of “the tree of life.” This phrase is only found in three books of the Bible. In Genesis, it brings eternal life to Adam and Eve, and therefore they are banished from it because of their sin (Genesis 3:22-24). In Revelation, the reconciled people of God are permitted once again to eat from it and find healing in the paradise of God (Revelation 2:7, 22:2). And in Proverbs, wisdom is “a tree of life” to those who find her (3:18 - see also 11:30, 13:12, 15:4).
Whatever the eschatology within the book of Proverbs, the connection of wisdom and folly to eternal life with God is one clearly developed by Jesus in the New Testament. The worldly-wise man who has actually managed to secure full, juicy barns - even, we could say, enjoying the fruit of old covenant blessing - is nonetheless an eternal fool (Luke 12:19-21).
And so the collation of the broad sweep of worldly-wisdom under the heading of “the fear of the Lord” causes us to pause whenever we see a proverb - like 10:1 - which seems to be basic common sense. The “wise son” in the book of Proverbs is, in its fullest sense, much more than a clever-clogs or a well-behaved boy; the “foolish son” is not merely the oik who pushes other children into the sandpit, or the feckless youth running off to Goa to “find himself”. These are categories which are properly understood only in the context of relationship with the living God.
Where is wisdom learned?
But this is not the only context which is important to consider in the learning of wisdom. In the thought-world of Proverbs, the assumption is that “wisdom is a matter of sons receiving the tradition of generations.”3 At least, the son in Proverbs must listen to his father and mother (1:8-9) - presumably because they are faithfully passing down the fear of the Lord and the wisdom which flows from it.
Here is where we need to be particularly mindful of the distance between our own world and that of the Proverbs. In our highly individual culture, each generation is expected to find its own way and discover their own wisdom, often in contradistinction to the ideas of their parents. After all, as Philip Larkin put it:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.4
Or think of the myriad films, TV shows and books whose young protagonist has to break free of the shackles of the hide-bound views of her elders and find her own, often transgressive, path to freedom. My daughter was given a book on Greta Thunberg for her birthday in which the gleeful denouement was “the children were finally telling the grown-ups what to do!”5 Or take the stage musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda (written by Tim Minchin), in which the young heroine is cast in precisely this light:
We’re told we have to do what we’re told but surely
Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.6
(Incidentally, my 12-year-old son’s reaction to hearing this particular gem on the car radio was to cry out in exasperation: “why do they have to take a perfectly good story and make it into this ‘you-can-be-whoever-you-want-to-be’ rubbish?!” This is a salient reminder that if you raise children in a highly individual culture where they are taught to question their elders, then repeatedly beat them around the head with the message “your elders think you should be highly individual - do your own thing! Cast off our shackles!” then you may find, quite by accident, that you raise a generation of reactionary conformists. We can only hope.)
Proverbs, however, was written into a context where submission to - and preservation of - family and community structures was of paramount importance. A nation founded on genealogical descent from Abraham, organised around tribal families, and promised a dynastic kingship (2 Sam 7) was, to say the least, not instinctively individualist.
The background of the Mosaic covenant raises the stakes even higher. Moses had already prophesied the abandonment of the fear of the Lord in future generations (Deut 32:29), and the covenant curses which accompanied such rebellion were so horrific that a son who stubbornly refused to obey his parents was to be publicly stoned in order to “purge the evil from your midst” (Deut 21:18-21). Such statements shock us today. But our shock can lead us in one of two directions. We will either condemn the Old Testament worldview because it does not accord with our own perspective (what C S Lewis famously referred to as “chronological snobbery”). Or we will examine our own culture’s habits and mores in the light of this old strangeness, and allow it to critique us before we turn to critique it.
This is a theme we’ll return to often, and grappling with it will involve some nuanced theology regarding the restructured New Covenant. But for now it suffices to say that we modern readers will simply have to work much harder to feel the impact of proverbs like the one before us. Very few people today would actively desire to bring grief to their parents, and the desire to please one’s father may well motivate someone to pursue a wise life. But what if your folly caused not only private grief, but public shame, community breakdown, and a threat to your nation’s entire existence?
Wisdom complicated - and fulfilled
So this seemingly obvious proverb has perhaps a richer and more profound meaning than we first thought. This is not a mere truism about the joys and stresses of parenting - it is beginning to sound like an urgent call to fear the Lord and walk in his ways, lest the very foundations of society crumble and the covenant relationship with God be sundered.
Yet there is one further thing we must consider. This statement is not part of the Law of Moses, but the Proverbs of Solomon. This is not a black-and-white “thou shalt not” prohibition. Like many of the proverbs we will encounter, it is simply a statement. A statement which generally, all things considered, is verifiably true - and yet, like the other proverbs, is complicated. Do foolish sons, for example, always bring grief to their mothers? What if the mother herself is foolish, and delights in her son being a chip off the old block? And do wise sons always make for glad fathers? Especially if we view wisdom as rooted in the fear of the Lord, this is sadly not the case. How many fathers have been exasperated to hear that one of their children has “got religion”?
And yet even as we see this wisdom is complicated, we are set on the path towards its fulfilment. Solomon may have urged this wisdom on his own son - one who would, more than the average young man in Israel, have need for it. The king was intended to be an exemplary Israelite, walking in the fear of the Lord (Deut 17:19), and would need all of God’s wisdom to execute justice as he was required (1 Kings 3:9). And yet when Solomon’s greater son came, one who grew daily in wisdom and so enjoyed the favour of God (Luke 2:40, 52 - compare Proverbs 3:4), he did not make his earthly father and mother as glad as our proverb would suggest, if we took it as a black-and-white statement of fact. Indeed, his mother thought he had gone mad (Mark 3:21, 31), and Jesus’ total devotion to God’s salvation plan brought her a grief which was like a sword passing through her very soul (Luke 2:35).
And yet he was one - indeed, the only one - with whom God was well pleased (Matt 3:17). Jesus’ wisdom made his Father glad. And in his wisdom we, too, can be made wise for salvation (1 Cor 1:30).
E.g. the collections of Proverbs from the apparently non-Israelite Agar (30:1ff) and Lemuel (31:1ff).
From The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame.
Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, 450.
The two previous stanzas of Larkin’s This Be The Verse famously make the same point in rather fruitier language.
We hid the book.
Full lyrics at https://genius.com/20638010?