Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs for Everyone

By John Goldingay

Westminster John Knox Press is pleased to present the seventeen-volume Old Testament for Everyone series. Internationally respected Old Testament scholar John Goldingay addresses Scripture from Genesis to Malachi in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply and concisely. The series is perfect for daily devotions, group study, or personal visits with the Bible.

In this volume, Goldingay explores three books of the Old Testament in the wisdom literature genre. These three books are all associated with Solomon and his wisdom, yet unlike other books, they do not mention the Torah, the exodus, or the covenant. As Goldingay says, "The basis of their teaching is the way life actually works. They look at life and reflect on experience and encourage people to live on the basis of how life works." Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs for Everyone explores three practical, down to earth, and hopeful books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781611645316

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. An internationally respected Old Testament scholar, Goldingay is the author of many commentaries and books.

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Introduction

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of writings that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books such as Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus that were traditionally called the Apocrypha, the books that were hidden away—a name that came to imply spurious. They are now often known as the Deuterocanonical Writings, which is more cumbersome but less pejorative; it simply indicates that these books have less authority than the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The precise list of them varies among different churches. For the purposes of this series that seeks to expound the Old Testament for Everyone, by the Old Testament we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community, though in the Jewish Bible they come in a different order, as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

They were not old in the sense of antiquated or out-of-date; I sometimes like to refer to them as the First Testament rather than the Old Testament to make that point. For Jesus and the New Testament writers, they were a living resource for understanding God, God’s ways in the world, and God’s ways with us. They were useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person who belongs to God can be proficient, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). They were for everyone, in fact. So it’s strange that Christians don’t read them very much. My aim in these volumes is to help you do so.

My hesitation is that you may read me instead of the Scriptures. Don’t fall into that trap. I like the fact that this series includes the biblical text. Don’t skip over it. In the end, that’s the bit that matters.

An Outline of the Old Testament

The Christian Old Testament puts the books in the Jewish Bible in a distinctive order:

Genesis to Kings: A story that runs from the world’s creation to the exile of Judahites to Babylon

Chronicles to Esther: A second version of this story, continuing it into the years after the exile

Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs: Some poetic books

Isaiah to Malachi: The teaching of some prophets

Here is an outline of the history that lies at the books’ background (I give no dates for events in Genesis, which involves too much guesswork).

Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs

The three books we cover in this volume come together in the Old Testament because they are all associated with Solomon. His name appears in the first verse of Proverbs and of the Song, and he’s just under the surface of Ecclesiastes (as we’ll see when we look at Ecclesiastes 1–2). As is the case with the association of Psalms with David, the link with Solomon doesn’t imply that he personally wrote the books (despite the nice rabbinical saying that Solomon wrote the Song with the naiveté of youth, Proverbs with the maturity of middle age, and Ecclesiastes with the disillusion of old age). Indeed, sayings such as the ones that appear in Proverbs don’t exactly have authors; the sayings somehow emerge. Further, Proverbs 25, 30, and 31 explicitly refer to other authors or collectors of the material in Proverbs. Ecclesiastes doesn’t name Solomon, and its use of Hebrew shows that it doesn’t belong to his day—it would be as if Shakespeare wrote in modern English. And Solomon’s story in Kings shows that he was clueless about love and is an unlikely author for love poetry. The point about the link with Solomon is that he’s the patron saint of wisdom as David is the patron saint of psalmody. First Kings 3 does speak of his asking God for wisdom, and God gives him a wise and discerning mind; he becomes the model of a wise king (for a while). So all wisdom can be seen as Solomonic.

The nature of the sayings in Proverbs likely means they accumulated over centuries. Many will go back before Solomon’s day and have their background in family life and the teaching of children by parents. Thus, when sayings speak like a father and mother teaching children, they are not speaking wholly metaphorically. Other passages in Proverbs relate especially to questions such as the relationship of a king’s staff to the king, and teaching of this kind in other Middle Eastern countries belongs in the context of the court college where people were prepared for the life of politics and administration. In contrast, other material in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes relates more to questions that would be asked in a theological college or seminary, questions about the meaning of creation, the nature of God’s relationship with the world, and the possibility of having answers to life’s big questions. It was during the Second Temple period that theological schools, the kind of places where rabbis would be trained, were developing in Israel; this might be the background of such elements in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes explicitly focus on the nature of wisdom. The Song, in expounding the nature of sexual love, doesn’t do so; but what it has in common with the other two Solomonic books is its focus on everyday life. The unique feature of the three Solomonic books is that they make no reference to the exodus or the covenant or the Torah or prophecy or the Day of the Lord. They do speak of God as Yahweh, and their teaching can parallel the teaching of the Torah; they are clearly Israelite. But they don’t teach by telling us that their teaching comes from God’s speaking or forms a response to God’s acting. The basis of their teaching is the way life actually works. They look at life and reflect on experience and encourage people to live on the basis of how life works. They don’t just leave people to live on the basis of their own experience; they assume that we can learn from other people’s experience, and they seek to pass on the reflection of wise men and women that arises from their experience. They assume that we learn from other people and learn from the past. We don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel. These books appeal to experience, which links them with equivalent works produced in countries such as Babylon and Egypt. These books don’t emerge from Yahweh’s special dealings with Israel that enabled Israel to know things about God’s purpose in the world that other people didn’t know. They emerged from the awareness about life of which any people can know something through being made in God’s image and living in God’s world.

Proverbs and the Song have in common that they are poetic books through and through; Ecclesiastes includes one of the best-known poems in all Scripture, but its poetic sections appear in a prose framework. In terms of form, the main characteristic of Hebrew poetry is that it is composed in short lines of about six words each, such that the second half of each line reexpresses, completes, clarifies, illustrates, or contrasts with the first.

Listen to your father’s discipline, son,

don’t abandon your mother’s teaching.

(Proverbs 1:8)

Kiss me with the kisses of your mouth,

because your love is better than wine.

(Song 1:2)

These two examples illustrate how Proverbs’ poetry tends to be down-to-earth, while the Song’s poetry is more lyrical. All poetry uses imagery so as to make more profound statements, and the Song is full of imagery—some of it rather obscure to us in our different cultural context.

Proverbs and the Song also have in common a fundamentally hopeful attitude to life. They think life can be understood and appreciated. Ecclesiastes belongs with Job in raising more questions than it answers. Proverbs and the Song on one hand and Ecclesiastes and Job on the other thus fulfill a complementary role in Scripture. Proverbs and the Song remind the worried, the uncertain, and the cynical of positive insights and of possibilities to reframe their attitudes. Ecclesiastes and Job remind the confident, the trusting, and the naive, of questions they need to take into account rather than thinking they have the truth all buttoned up.

Ecclesiastes and the Song also belong to the same group of books—known as the Five Scrolls—within the Hebrew Bible’s different orderings of its books. The other books in the Five Scrolls are Ruth, Lamentations, and Esther. These books were read at five different festivals each year—the Song at Passover (on the basis of its being understood as an allegory of God’s history with Israel) and Ecclesiastes at Sukkot (perhaps because of its stress on joy and on God’s giving, even in the context of its acknowledging the transience of life). It was the Greek translation of the Old Testament that located these books with the other poetic books in a way that draws attention to their being not books that tell a story about the past (like Genesis through Esther) or books that announce what God will do in the future (like Isaiah through Malachi) but books that relate directly to everyday life in the present.

Proverbs 1:1–19

Wisdom’s Dictionary

I turned onto the freeway near our house, built up speed down the ramp, noticed as I reached the main lanes that there was a gap in the traffic but that a bunch of cars was on its way, so I built up speed to 80 or so to get ahead of them. Unfortunately they included a highway patrolman who pointed his radar gun at me. On went his lights and his siren. When we had stopped, he asked me, Sir, do you know what the speed limit is on this road? I said yes; I knew it was 65. But if we had been in Israel and we had been speaking Hebrew, I might have been less sure how to answer, because in biblical Hebrew, at least, the verb for know often denotes not merely knowing something in your head but knowing something in your actions. To know the law or to know God implies not merely knowing what the law says or knowing God in a personal way but acknowledging the law or acknowledging God by one’s behavior—submitting to and obeying what one knows.

The opening paragraph of Proverbs thus comes to a climax by declaring that the first principle of knowledge is awe for Yahweh, whereas stupid people despise wisdom and discipline; the opening chapter of Proverbs refers to knowing or knowledge six times. But the knowing isn’t expressed merely in achieving a high IQ or a high score in the Standardized Admissions Test (SAT). The point runs through the opening paragraph, which introduces many of Proverbs’ key words. The connection between what goes on in the head and what goes on in the life immediately appears in the link between wisdom and discipline. Increasing in wisdom is tied up with increasing in discipline. It’s linked with the idea of getting discipline or getting wisdom—the word is the Hebrew verb that means to take. Getting hold of wisdom involves action. We speak of grasping things, and the word for grasp here is related to the word for getting. Grasping is an activity. In substance, gaining wisdom is related to understanding words that express understanding—the Hebrew word for understanding is related to the word for between, so it hints at the capacity to distinguish between things or to see behind the surface of things.

The Hebrew word for judiciousness is often translated shrewdness; it’s the capacity attributed to the snake in Genesis 2. It suggests being able to get people to do what you want them to do. It can have a bad connotation or a good connotation. Similarly discretion suggests skill in thinking things through and formulating plans, which in other contexts can be evil plans. That ambiguity points toward the significance of some other motifs in this opening paragraph. Alongside the references to wisdom and knowledge comes a sudden reference to faithfulness, the exercise of authority, and uprightness. The first two expressions appear frequently in the Prophets and also in the Torah; they are usually translated something like justice and righteousness, but they denote something more like faithfulness in making decisions. Appearing here, they imply that knowledge, judiciousness, and discretion need to be in the service of these moral qualities.

Together, the references to these moral qualities and to awe for Yahweh make a double point. It can be tempting to treat questions about economics, business, education, counseling, or foreign policy as issues in their own right that should not be mixed up with questions about religion or ethics. In particular cultural contexts (such as that of the United States with its separation of church and state), people such as Jews and Christians may have no alternative to living with that assumption in some areas of life. But we need to see how unnatural and unbiblical it is to consider policy questions, ethics, and God as separate spheres. Proverbs begins by urging its readers to let them interweave. Christians and Jews cannot adopt from the world theories or practices of business or counseling or education without setting them in the context of what we know about ethics and about God. Proverbs thus models how to go about learning from the secular world: we are open to such learning, but we set the secular world’s theories and findings into a framework that includes God and ethics.

Maybe that fact links with the further promise that Proverbs’ teaching is designed to help people understand parables and puzzles. Parables are straightforward-sounding stories whose real meaning is rather enigmatic; puzzles are the mysterious topics that the wise seek to understand, such as the nature of creation and the problem of evil. We’ll never understand everything about such topics, but we’ll gain more understanding if we take ethics and God into account.

The subsequent paragraph of teaching on a specific topic offers a correlative take on these questions. Parents are naturally concerned about their children getting into company that will lead them astray. The topic the paragraph raises makes clear that Proverbs’ references to children should not be assumed to concern little children. It’s a better starting assumption that they have in mind teenagers and adults. Proverbs assumes that father and mother continue to be the heads of the family as long as they are alive. Even if the middle-aged children are running the family farm, their parents are still the repository of wisdom.

The opening paragraph has made the positive point that ethical living will also be wise living (live ethically and you’ll get on in life OK). The teaching about avoiding bad company makes the correlative negative point that unethical living is stupid. If you spread a net in the open to catch a bird, you’ll fail; it will not be so silly as to fall into the trap. But the gang’s proposed kind of behavior suggests it’s trying to get caught. It’s like setting an ambush for yourself.

Proverbs 1:20–2:22

Students in Four Flavors

My students come in several flavors. Some begin their papers with an apology for the fact that before the class they had never read the Pentateuch or the Prophets (or whatever is the subject). Some have done enough study to hit the ground running with sharp questions and sharp observations. Some have been told by their Sunday school teacher what the Old Testament is about and are resistant to reading it for themselves and finding that it’s other than what they expected. Some are intrigued by that discovery. Some just want to get a passing grade and will spend part of their class time answering emails rather than taking part.

Proverbs has four related target audiences. There are the naive, young people, the people who might be literally addressed by their mothers and fathers. They need to acquire insight for life. Yet this doesn’t mean its teaching is irrelevant to older people who have already gained some such insight. Proverbs believes in lifelong learning and believes that the people who are already wise need to continue to increase in wisdom; the opening paragraph has already made that point. We sometimes wonder what new truths we need to learn, but as often as not we need to get a securer or fresher grasp of things that in theory we know already.

For both the naive and the wise, Proverbs has some hope. Of the other two groups, it’s more despairing. Wisdom’s antithesis is stupidity. Stupid people are not people with academic learning difficulties but people who turn their backs on the kind of wisdom that has moral implications. Stupidity thus overlaps with arrogance. The arrogant are the people who mock the teaching of the wise. They think they know everything already. Their mouths are always open, but their ears are closed.

Proverbs pictures Ms. Wisdom as a personification of its teaching and imagines her like a prophet standing in a public square where merchants and other preachers might assemble to sell their wares. Like a prophet, Ms. Wisdom urges people to pay attention, warns them of the consequences of their stupid lifestyle, and urges them to turn from it. Wisdom’s teaching is very similar to that of the Torah and the Prophets, though it argues its point on a different basis. Instead of saying Listen, because I say so, like Moses, or Listen, or God will intervene in judgment, like a prophet, Ms. Wisdom says Listen, or you’ll find your life ends up in a mess as a natural result of the choices you’re making. And don’t think that I shall be weeping when it does. I shall be thinking that it’s just what you deserved. As my mother used to say, Don’t come crying to me when it happens. But she didn’t really mean it, and neither I imagine did Ms. Wisdom: like a mother, she knows that actually she’ll be weeping and will respond to her child. But she’s willing to try anything to get through her child’s thick skull, to get her to take some notice.

In the second paragraph, Proverbs becomes even more like Moses or a prophet in speaking of God’s involvement in our lives in a personal way. Life isn’t simply a matter of natural cause and effect, as if God had set the world going at the beginning with its inherent cause-and-effect system and could then leave it to its own devices. Yahweh is one who gives, speaks, stores up, shields, guards, protects.

The transition to talk about adultery at the end of the chapter seems sudden. We will note several possible reasons for its being a focus in Proverbs 1–9. This passage makes one of the few explicit biblical references to marriage as a covenant, a key element in the theological and ethical reasoning that sees adultery as wrong. Further, the phrase alien woman may indicate that the woman is a foreigner and thus a worshiper of some other god than Yahweh, the God of Israel, so that marital unfaithfulness and unfaithfulness to Yahweh are related. It’s easy to imagine that there were women in Israel who walked out on their marriages (and maybe fled to another country) because of abuse or because of their husbands’ adultery, and in the cultural context it would be more or less impossible for them to have a home and have access to something to eat except in the context of a family (a birth family or a marital family). The pressures were perhaps not so different from ones in the modern world that drive women