BLDJ: Chapter 4

Posted on March 17, 2015 by ehurst

In essence, the Law of Noah is hard-wired into human nature. That is, the Law of Noah reflects what God revealed as the best way to live after the Fall. It would prevent the necessity of another global destruction of the human race until the End of Time. It answers to the Flaming Sword at the entrance to Eden (Genesis 3:24), the revelation of God that is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). It is as much as we can know about the fundamental nature of reality as God created it.

Of course, man has done his best to obscure that instinctive knowledge. Placing human reason on the throne of the soul and silencing the heart has produced a plethora of cultural diversions from God’s truth. We struggle to peel away all the man-made trash to recover what Noah and his kin took for granted.

The first and most shocking necessity for Westerners to grasp is that we are hard-wired for Ancient Near Eastern feudalism. The Genesis narratives all assume this as the standard form of human government that was the one best answer to God’s demand in the Covenant of Noah. Someone has to bear the sword and execute those who forget that blood is sacred in God’s eyes. In the broader biblical context, it requires something horrific in the human soul to treat any bloodshed with casual indifference.

On the one hand, God mentioned to Noah in passing that, when gathering animals into the Ark, some were clean (“kosher”) but the rest were not. So Noah was to collect seven each of the clean animals, but only a breeding pair of all others. These were acceptable offerings and safe to eat. On the other hand, God also told Noah that he could hunt down any animal as necessary. Animals are not on par with humans. While the blood of animals is sacred enough to require they be drained before eating, human blood is even more sacred in the eyes of God. It was more than simply a dead heart that did not treat blood as sacred; it was a demonic threat to God’s Laws that anyone should refuse to respect life.

Here we note echoes of shalom that arose later under Moses. The whole point of having a government is to protect human life, but more, to safeguard social stability. The Hebrew word shalom is more than mere peace, but all the things necessary for a peaceful life. It’s another way of describing social stability. The whole point of government is to promote a stable life that lends itself to the same predictability that God promised Noah. If Noah would institute a stable social life under ANE feudal government, then God would provide a stable cycle of seasons. All the other forms of government man has dreamed up since then are inferior in God’s eyes, because every part of His revelation assumes the ANE feudal government and the ANE tribal social structure to go with it.

Thus, we note that ANE feudalism is not about land and physical possessions, but regards people as the greatest treasure. In the ancient world outside of Eden, where most of humanity now have to learn how to reawaken the sensory heart, and learn the moral purity necessary to get nature to cooperate in sustaining life and health, any community would need all the bodies they can get. More people living together in a single community means greater safety and comfort, and a better chance at the material prosperity necessary to live.

At the same time, they hardly objectified the value of human life as Western society does. We say “life is precious” but then use that phrase as an excuse to make vast stretches of humanity utterly miserable. This is an example of human reason perverting God’s revealed truth. If all you have is your reason, then you cannot help but get everything wrong. ANE feudalism is not slavish about keeping every human heart beating, but rather clings to the moral value of reducing human suffering to a minimum. Some human suffering is simply part of the Fall; there is a legitimate level of misery built into our existence. Along with that is a legitimate level of mortality. Westerners have a rabid hatred for death; it was simply a part of life in the ANE. There is no fear of death in a sensory heart, but there is a distaste for unnecessary human sorrow.

Thus, with the proper moral priority on minimizing the natural human sorrow, we find that whatever flaws there might be in ANE feudal government, nothing else man has dreamed up can come close to answering God’s demands. The only hope for satisfying the Law of Noah is that ANE feudal government and a tribal social structure. That is, you generally expect to live among your kinfolks in extended family households. In each household there is a dominant male head, with a supporting female head, and everyone knows your personal business. We have a very poor grasp of just how much freedom was still offered in that setting. It was messy and inefficient with lots of time wasted on trying to convince folks to go along on a vast wealth of details in daily life. But it was safe and supportive, and thus quite stable.

Meanwhile, by various means some families rose to a higher influence than others within a clan, and some men rose to greater prominence. It was organic, with customs simply minimizing the risk of past sorrows. At some point, there was always a male chief who took responsibility for recognizing that one of their clan was a threat to social stability. Whatever their conduct, if the malefactor could not be restrained and the damage contained, they were executed to prevent them destroying shalom for everyone else. It was always personal, and there was no passing the buck to some outsider. Each family cleaned up their own messes. The same basic idea was extended to when one of your kin threatened the shalom of some neighboring clan or tribe, as well. Depending on the nature of the offense, you would either execute them yourself or turn them over to their victims.

Again, the stark reality: No other system of government and family life will satisfy the Covenant of Noah. This was not some random happenstance. God designed and created the ANE feudal society as the one best way to meet human need, to meet the fundamental nature of our wiring, and to meet the nature of reality itself.

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Proverbs 2

Posted on March 16, 2015 by ehurst

To the untrained eye, this chapter seems almost pedantic. Solomon piles up the overlapping phrases again, trying to convince his readers that God is the source of all wisdom. Our problem in Western society is that we are so utterly convinced that spiritual wisdom is one thing, and morality almost another thing, but that we can get along through life just fine with our human wisdom regarding science and technology. What difference does it make to God how someone engineers next year’s car model? So long as there is nothing in the car company’s actions that warrant a boycott, what does that have to do with God?

Therein lies the issue. Even in Solomon’s day, there was a major problem with folks convinced they could use their human reason and wisdom to work out all kinds of things and not have to worry about divine wisdom all the time. So Solomon uses his position as the wisest man in history, at least up to that point in that part of the world, to counteract that false notion.

If you are going to deal with reality, it’s always best to start by asking the Person who made it that reality. Failing to start with God’s revealed moral truth means it won’t matter what you engineer, He won’t bless it. That may not have a noticeable effect, or at least not so much on a human time frame, but it makes a difference. So perhaps we should not have started that car company, never mind how the next model is engineered. Or maybe the whole concept of automobiles is really terribly wrong, and will eventually bring God’s wrath. You won’t know until you make it a point to ask God.

Start with the moral fabric of Creation, the moral character of God Himself, and everything else you do will make sense. Otherwise, nothing you do will make sense in this reality, despite how it may appear to human reason. Solomon hammers on it over and over in this chapter. He uses some rather obvious images that would tear at the fabric of a covenant society, like an adulteress. Everybody knows better, but some men just don’t know how to tell that head between their legs, “No.” And by this time in Israel’s history, there were plenty of well known examples of how that never quite worked out. Would you have liked to ask Solomon’s mother, Bathsheeba about her first-born?

The adulteress is named Folly. Get to know her from a distance.

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BLDJ: Chapter 3

Posted on March 16, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

3. Basic Biblical Law Code

The Covenant of Moses was for that people, in that land, at that time in history. It was never meant to be universal. Further, it ended at the Cross. Jesus was the final fulfillment of the purpose of the Law Covenant. The nation was no longer a special project of God, just another tribal nation in a sea of humanity. Jesus had already said their DNA didn’t mean a thing: “God could raise up children of Abraham from these stones” (Matthew 3:9). This was a shocking contrast to the Jewish attitude that, God having once elected them as His Chosen, even He could not rescind that decision. Yet there is ample evidence from the prophets and the even as far back as the day of adoption at Mount Sinai that the Covenant was entirely conditional upon their faithfulness.

Though that covenant is now an artifact of history, Paul warned Timothy that it remained as the record of how we should think about God. So we study the Old Testament as the source from which we abstract a proper image of His divine character. While the particulars of the Law no long apply to anyone at all, they portray God as He preferred to be seen by mankind. It was by far the clearest expression of His nature. It was not as if He chose Israel from among many other candidate nations. He created Israel specifically for this purpose. Indeed, the prophets indicated they were easily the worst nation God could choose, often suggesting that, had any other nation been in their place, the story would have ended quite differently. But it did end and we are left with the legacy of their failure to study and understand.

At the same time, there is a far older Law Covenant still in force today. It was not a national covenant, but universal in scope: The Covenant of Noah. So long as there are rainbows in the sky, Noah is still binding on the human race.

While we generally shouldn’t trust the Talmud — what Jesus dismissed as the “tradition of the elders” — for much, what it says regarding the Noahic Laws (sometimes Noachide) seems consistent with Scripture. There are seven according to official sources:

1. Do Not Deny God (prohibition against idolatry)
2. Do Not Blaspheme God (more specifically, cursing His name)
3. Do Not Murder
4. Do Not Engage in Incestuous, Adulterous or Homosexual Relationships (includes prohibition against bestiality)
5. Do Not Steal
6. Do Not Eat of a Live Animal (also stated as meat with blood in it)
7. Establish Courts/Legal System to Ensure Law Obedience

You will notice that the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 echoes these same laws. It should be simple enough to recognize that they saw no need to restate 2, 3, 5 and 7. Blasphemy was too obvious, and the rest were covered under civil law already. It’s the remaining provisions that would have been news to most Gentiles. What we notice is that the Council considered these applicable to Gentiles, while Jews would have already been in the habit of obeying Moses. The two were more or less equivalent in that sense. (We note the Council read the sixth as a matter of meat with blood in it, in that context a reference to pagan ritual strangling.)

Indeed, given that Noah preceded Moses, and still stands after the end of Moses, we surmise that Moses was rather like a particular expression of Noah, being far more detailed and narrowly tailored to Israelis. You will also notice the Seven Noahic Laws parallel the Ten Commandments somewhat. However, the Decalogue is part of Moses, and not specifically binding on us today. Rather, like the rest of Moses’ Law, we use it reveal the moral character of God.

So how do we get those seven laws from the rather simple declaration in the Flood Narrative in Genesis 9? The business of not eating blood is clearly stated, but it seems the focus is on executing murderers. The folks who extrapolated those extra requirements were quite familiar with the very different assumptions people held back in the days of Noah. Is anyone surprised that those who wrote the ancient Scripture were addressing their own social context? Why would they state the obvious when they had no idea what would be forgotten in future generations? Our task is to make some effort to recover as much of that social and intellectual context as possible. Not in the sense of slavish emulation, but to understand why God chose to reveal Himself in that context so that we can discern what applies to us here and now.

Again, this Code of Noah remains binding on all human governments, and the entire human race as individuals. This becomes the basic reference for biblical law. However, there were a raft of basic assumptions about life that Noah and his immediate descendants held that are completely missing from our world today.

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Proverbs 1

Posted on March 15, 2015 by ehurst

(Yeah, I’m a busy boy working on two books at once.)

The first verse served as the ancient title of the entire book. The next five verses explain the reason for the book. It appears this would serve as a textbook for what we would consider secondary education. Solomon uses a string of phrases that are largely equivalent in meaning, but chosen and strung together to confirm just that. Let the reader understand that you cannot pretend to slice and dice wisdom as a separate exercise from morality in general. It’s not a question of what you know, but to Whom you are committed. In the Ancient Near East, moral wisdom was the ultimate proper aim of all research. In Israel this was somewhat simplified by recognizing only one God. Thus, everything men have always sought is bound up in reaching for His moral character.

Thus, the next few verses state the theme of the book as compiled revelatory wisdom from previous generations. The one treasure of every nation was social stability between generations. If you catch children early enough, you can instill a respect for their elders. It wasn’t merely a promise from God that those who honored their parents would have a long life (Exodus 20:12); that was how Creation itself worked. Respect for elders was not merely avoiding punishment, but was embracing cosmic moral wisdom. Let no one mistake the matching necessity of elders to ensure they had not wasted their own lives but had sought wisdom long enough to have something to offer the young.

What begins in verse ten is not a new subject, but a dramatic restatement of what a society becomes if the elders are fools and the young learn nothing from them. It’s every individual for himself. This wild plotting to gang up on healthy adults to plunder them is a reference to one’s own kin. In the ancient Hebrew society, the image is all the more shocking because they lived in tribal communities. These were irresponsible brats talking about killing their own uncles. Had they any real need, virtually everything necessary for life was already community property. How stupid is to steal from your own food stores, killing the folks who grew it for you? What kind of world would that be? So in essence, Solomon is offering this disturbing image of what happens when moral wisdom does not remain the preoccupation of any society.

We are not supposed to take that image literally, but see it as a parable. Hebrew literature at its best was parabolic in nature. Genuine moral truth was always out of reach of direct description, but could be indicated by something more familiar. Thus, the rest of the chapter introduces the parable of the noble woman, Wisdom.

Solomon describes her as striving hard to get everyone’s attention. In the most public fashion imaginable, yet entirely proper and honorable, this woman calls out to people everywhere. Did they listen? Apparently nowhere near as many as could have done so. She warns them that there will come a time when she will mock them after they have ignored her advice and done everything wrong. Once the pain and suffering takes hold, it will be too late. Rejecting God’s revelation can be deadly in many ways, she warns.

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BLDJ: Chapter 2

Posted on March 15, 2015 by ehurst

(Serializing here the draft of my book, Biblical Law: Divine Justice.)

2. Justice as Proposal

You can blow it off as a figure of speech, but the Bible takes this business of the sensory heart very seriously. It is impossible to understand, much less explain, much of what happens in Scripture using a mere cerebral approach. Relying on the intellect is the very substance of the Fall. Redemption is moving our lives back as close to Eden as possible. The guide to what’s possible are the various Law Covenants God revealed in the Bible.

They were not legislation in our modern Western sense, but were expressions of something far higher than what can possibly come across in any human tongue. They reflect the character of God, and the language He used for His revelation was never meant to restrict, as if language was just a vehicle for carrying truth. Rather, Hebrew language was used as sign posts indicating directions for further exploration.

If you committed yourself to carefully obeying all the written prescriptions in the Law Covenants, you would not have implemented divine justice. God’s Law is a proposal for personal commitment, not a proposition. The mythology of “propositional truth” is an entirely pagan notion dreamed up by Greek philosophers. It is utterly foreign to the ancient Hebrew people. Thus, Scripture records how such pedantic obedience never did much good, but that those who obeyed from the heart of commitment to God’s favor always managed to find His favor despite very real human failures.

Thus, the fundamental nature of divine justice is personal and relational. It is a personal commitment of the individual soul to the Person of God. This was the underlying assumption behind all the Law Covenants. Thus, our first reference to God’s revealed Law comes from the mouth of His Son, Jesus Christ.

And one of them, an expert in religious law, asked him a question to test him: “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” Jesus said to him, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. The second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:35-40 NET

In this, Jesus quotes a portion of a common ritual pronouncement taken from Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and a portion from Leviticus 19:18. It should be obvious to anyone that the love Jesus said we owed to God is not any mere emotion, but a long-term commitment of the heart. It follows in standard Hebrew logic that you cannot love God and fail to love your neighbor. The passage in Matthew goes on to attack the Jewish concept of “neighbor” by telling the story of the Good Samaritan. In other words, Jesus restored the ancient Hebrew concept of neighbor that the Jews had abandoned long before Christ came. Jesus had this discussion with a Jewish lawyer who had been long and thoroughly steeped in the more recent Hellenized form of reasoning popular in rabbinical colleges, a solid departure from Hebrew intellectual traditions. (Hellenism refers to the Classical Greek intellectual traditions, a fundamental element in Western Civilization.)

The point Jesus made was that divine justice was personal, and could not possibly be objectified as Judaism had done. He was calling them back to their ancient Hebrew roots. This was a giant leap for Jewish minds, because it was twice removed. On top of the shallow rule-bound thinking of dead hearts, Judaism was also highly analytical and semantically dissected Moses’ writings in a thousand ways utterly foreign to Hebrew language. While the lawyer recognized what Jesus was saying, he found it completely out of his personal reach. Thus, we have here the summary of disjunction between legalistic reasoning that objectified God versus a very personal heart-centered commitment to God’s character.

So this is not about Jewish Law, because Jewish legalism is a frank rejection of the ancient biblical standard of justice. Whatever Judaism might have been in Jesus’ day, it was not Moses, and it has drifted only farther since then. At Sinai, Israel was told they were entering into a covenant of adoption as Children of God, heirs of His divine justice and His glory in Creation. Like Esau, they valued it only as it filled their bellies. The otherworldly focus was completely absent. Precious few in the Nation of Israel throughout her sordid history ever seemed to understand what a grand privilege it was to hold in their hands God’s own personally edited copy of revelation. They wasted no time in throwing aside their identity as Israel-the-Mission and clung greedily to their imaginary status for preferential treatment as Israel-the-Chosen race.

The starting point for understanding Moses and the national covenant is in the words of Jesus as He answered that lawyer’s question that day. A critical element in understanding our duty to glorify God is that we embrace His character and manifest it through our actions. All those rich promises were conditioned in part on conforming to the moral fabric of Creation. More than just observing the provisions in Moses’ Law, it was reaching through the Law to God’s Person and seeking His favor. Creation is pre-programmed to respond in some measure by cooperating with such a genuine effort. Love God and love your neighbor, and you can expect nature itself to be happy to see you and ready to make God look good by meeting your needs.

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Psalm 41

Posted on March 14, 2015 by ehurst

This psalm sounds exactly like David’s experience when his son Absalom rose to usurp the throne (2 Samuel 15). The poetry here depicts a rather sharp and painful memory still fresh in his mind.

The term for “poor” here refers to any sort of misfortune. Thus, it is a standard poetic image David draws of godly mercy. It echoes in the Beatitudes of Jesus (Matthew 5:7) with, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.” We have ample evidence that David had been merciful according to the terms of Mosaic Law, so he had every reason to lay claim to God’s mercy. There is no arrogance here, as David openly confesses his sin. Contrast this to the opportunistic behavior of his wayward son.

We gather that David suffered a long illness during a time when his son was sowing discord. The king’s official absence would have made the political intrigue that much easier. Among David’s court advisors was Ahitophel, who served as Absalom’s spy and stirred up trouble among the palace staff. While he might have wished for a natural succession by David’s death, it was not to be. But before David could recover fully, the trap was sprung. Ahitophel’s deceptive behavior is described in the Hebrew idiom of “making his heel great against me.” This was also used to describe how Judas betrayed Jesus (John 13:18-19).

David doesn’t ask God to punish them, but asks only that he be allowed to recover enough strength to execute justice himself. This is entirely appropriate for a king, who bore the burden as chief executive of God’s justice in the kingdom. David knew that the primary mark of God’s favor was his military prowess and success in battle. Thus it had always been before David was crowned. He knew this was conditioned on his careful obedience to the Law of Moses, not just in the letter, but in a heartfelt devotion to God.

Thus, he ends with a call for people to glorify God as long as the universe stands. Amen!

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New Book: Biblical Law

Posted on March 14, 2015 by ehurst

Current working title is Biblical Law: Divine Justice (acronym for future reference: BLDJ). I’m serializing the chapter drafts here, so today I’m posting what would be the first chapter.

1. Biblical Logic

God is Creator. He does not reside within Creation, but His existence is rooted outside of it in a separate higher dimension. Nonetheless, Creation is infused with His divine character. In other words, our reality reflects His personality. This includes our human nature. By design we would naturally act on His moral character while living within His Creation.

This means that we have within us a faculty for connecting to that higher dimension of existence. With such faculty in bloom, we would naturally perceive what constitutes a proper course of action that conforms to His will and satisfies the demands of His glory. Our purpose for existing in this realm of Creation is to glorify Him.

The path to His glory is claiming His promises for our lives. We gain the leverage for this by allowing that higher faculty to reign in our souls. The Fall was, in essence, a decision to place human reason on that throne of our souls, a faculty much weaker and far less capable of discerning God’s character in the various opportunities confronting us in His Creation. Indeed, human reason is wholly incapable of discerning His character, and thus unfit to rule human conduct. If all we have is our intellect, we will only by accident ever do what is just and right in the eyes of God. Indeed, we would remain in our sins for the very reason of silencing that higher divine faculty for seeing His truth.

The intellect exists solely as the organizer and implementer of truth leaking down into our consciousness from a higher faculty. The Bible refers to this higher faculty as the heart. It is considered the seat of the will, the part of us capable of interfacing with the Spirit Realm. The Bible describes it as a sensory organ all its own, a superior faculty that was designed to rule the intellect. The will is not a part of the mind, but is an element in the conscious soul when we allow it to rule. If it does not rule, it says mostly nothing at all. This leaves moral character to random guessing.

Western Civilization presumes there is nothing higher than the intellect, enslaves the heart to the reason, and is primarily man-centered, in contrast to the Hebrew God-centered thinking. Thus, it hardly surprises anyone that the entire range of Western thinking about law and justice is man-centered. Insofar as there is anything higher than man, it is nothing more than human-derived ideals, a disembodied myth of objective truth. In the Bible, all truth is a direct reflection of God’s Person and character. It is wholly dependent on Him as a living Person in dynamic interaction with His Creation. If something does not reflect His divine nature, it cannot be “truth.”

Thus, we come to the realization that man does not have some noble task of reasoning his way to some objective truth about reality. Justice is not some human effort to abstract a reasonable set of controls that would be realistic when tested analytically by wise minds. Divine justice is revealed. While an active ruling heart could reasonably hope to discern some measure of His divine truth in Creation, mere intellect would utterly miss the point for lack of capability. Intellectual development matters, but moral development of the heart is far more important.

More importantly, Biblical logic finds ludicrous the notion that what is generally reasonable is reasonable in all contexts. That is, it is downright silly to assume that justice can be objectified and formulated as a universal guide. Divine justice is intensely personal in nature, and always contextual. The underlying fabric of truth cannot be stated objectively or formulated in convenient human language. It is living and active and morphs with the context, so that it requires a developed heart that senses the moral priority within the current situation. The Bible characterizes Creation itself as a living being, and divine justice is simply the Person of God manifested in proper moral choices consistent with His personality.

Nobody imagines that any Western government would pretend to understand such an approach, much less bend itself to the demands of revelation. By the same token, no one who has a living and active heart will ever imagine any Western democratic government is in any way supported and actively protected by God on moral grounds. All human political activity is passively permitted or actively guided by God, but not a single human authority under current secular state assumptions pleases God. They ignore Him and He uses them indirectly. They are all illegitimate under His revelation.

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Admin: Parish Rituals

Posted on March 13, 2015 by ehurst

An offline question led to the realization I’ve never actually discussed rituals for our parish. There is a sense in which we can’t do them. One, we don’t have anyone officially designated as our priestly pastor, someone to handle the ritual half of parish business. And while elders (me, for example) are permitted to perform some rituals, it is not specifically encouraged. It’s what we do when no ritual leader is available.

And two, there is the obvious: None of the membership is geographically close enough to engage any of the parish leaders directly. However, there is nothing in Scripture forbidding self-led rituals. It’s sort of a second-rate substitute for having a real church congregation in one physical location. In other words, it will do, inasmuch as we don’t take rituals that seriously. Christian Mysticism uses rituals as mere tools. The real need in a ritual leader is leadership.

There are four primary rituals. Two are presumed — marriage and burial. Those tend to be shaped by local custom and wishes of the participants and sponsors. Two are specifically ordained — baptism and the communion meal. As you might expect, the rules are highly flexible. For baptism, the whole point is ritual cleansing, so it won’t matter if you dunk or pour, so long as the person baptized gets substantially wet. It takes place when you feel you have hit a turning point and are making a fresh start. Repeat as you see fit. I see no point in doing it for infants and such, but there’s no particular objection, either. For the communion meal, while we all recognize the symbolism of bread and wine, it’s probably much more important to use typical local ingredients. So any grain without leavening and any juice, fermented or not. It’s probably a good idea to aim for annual observance sometime near the Hebrew Passover. More often is optional.

That’s as much guidance as you’ll get from me. The whole point of any ritual is to signify something to your own soul, and ideally in genuine spiritual communion with fellow believers. None of these rituals are tied to any kind of formal membership. Ask questions.

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Flashback: The Rehabilitation of Peter

Posted on March 13, 2015 by ehurst

A major focus here at Kiln of the Soul virtual parish is healing, of restoring divine justice to the lives of individuals. Naturally that puts our emphasis on pastoral counseling. I write with the aim to declare as clearly as possible what it takes to restore moral justice to your life. Few things in Scripture compare to the moment when Jesus counseled Peter, but I would challenge you to see it from a pastoral counseling point of view.

I’m working my way through the document archive on my static site, editing and then reformatting as PDFs because WordPress allows me to upload them to the media library on this blog. Today I’m adding my examination of John 21. You can get your own copy here.

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Introduction to Proverbs

Posted on March 12, 2015 by ehurst

(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.

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