(This is a formal draft of the study itself.)
It would be impossible to characterize just why God decided He wanted to create a world populated with humans. Nothing in revelation provides a hint in that direction. However, we do know that Creation itself is infused with the character of God, and that we were originally designed to know that divine character instinctively. While that faculty remains, it is obscured by our fallen natures. We refused to let that faculty rule our lives and placed human reason on the throne in its place. Redemption is the process of restoring that lost faculty for knowing God’s ways, in part by training the mind to take its proper place in service to this higher capability, as opposed to a mind serving far lesser motivations.
So much was the intent of Ancient Hebrew wisdom literature. It was training the mind to accept a higher power as the source for insight into reality. As a man of letters himself, we can sense that Solomon’s reign featured a major effort to establish a body of literature for restoring the mind to its proper task of understanding moral truth. Solomon wanted people to realize that God’s Creation itself spoke of this moral truth, if only the mind was prepared to hear it. To Solomon, God’s wisdom could be self-evident, so that you could recognize it in any source from anywhere, including the distilled wisdom literature of other nations and cultures. That his legendary learning drew visitors from those other nations placed him in a unique position to gather various expressions of divine truth from a wide range of sources.
Rather than collect vast archives of long narratives as the Babylonians were known to do, Solomon chose to gather the smallest samples, short epigrams that would, in the fewest words possible, open up a wealth of moral understanding. Rather than pretending that moral truth can be defined and neatly explained, Hebrew literature presumed that, once the mind was accustomed to hearing from God, God Himself would bring His character to life in a willing soul. A critical element in Hebrew intellectual history is the notion that words are mere signposts to vast territories worthy of exploration. To ensure the mind knew what to expect, moral wisdom was characterized as whatever promotes shalom — social stability within the Covenant. This is the sense of how things work with God in control. Folly is just about any path a man chooses that ignores or is insensitive to God’s moral character in Creation.
There are three sections to this book.
1. Chapters 1-9: Solomon’s Introduction — He calls for his son (a disciple could be called a “son”) to embrace moral wisdom, and uses the image of Wisdom as a good woman who is seldom sought, and has to go forth and call men who seem unwilling to come to her. Thus, we have this paradox of a marvelous perfect woman every man should be fighting to have, but no one seems to want her. Contrast this to the other, more popular woman, Folly.
2. Chapters 10-29: A large collection of proverbs, each requiring some explanation.
3. Chapters 30-31: Collected material from other authors.
All proverbs are contextual, as is the Hebrew language itself, often enough. In a few cases, they seem to contradict each other because the difference in context is not obvious to Western readers. Some of these proverbs aim at “Choose this, not that.” Some are more a matter of, “If you choose this, it comes with that.” Still others reflect holy cynicism: “It matters not what you choose because that’s the way people are.”
Several are repeated outright, while many are restatements of the same thought, or at least the same theme. Most of them are couplets. The proverbs come in the form of parallel ideas or as contrasts. In some cases, the second line simply expands on the first. Virtually the whole collection is cast in the context of a Covenant Nation and the society naturally arising from it. Too much of what they took for granted is not obvious when reading the proverbs, and too much of what we take for granted is simply alien to their world.
