"Reclaiming Proverbs"
September 19, 2021
But perhaps its most quintessentially northern liberal/progressive mainline Protestant church feature is that, among the average congregant anyways, biblical literacy is pretty low. Seriously. It’s something my partner—who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, formed in your typical southern mainline/Evangelical Protestant church, you know, the Bible Belt—and I tease each other about on a regular basis. She can’t wrap her head around the fact that I made it all the way to my last year of seminary before learning about the full-on existence of Nahum as a book in the Bible, and I can’t wrap my head around all of the purity culture nonsense that she had to endure. We pretty much even each other out.
All that’s to say, that when it came time for my home church to start thinking about how it would celebrate its 200th anniversary, one of our ministers decided to try and get 200 members of the congregation to commit to reading through the whole Bible in one year. You know, to actually see what is in and isn’t in this collection of texts that we have set apart and call “the word of God for the people of God”.
So he got a list of people who wanted to take this on, created a weekly reading list, and provided opportunities for folks who wanted some accountability to go through the process in small groups—a very Wesleyan approach, well done, Mike.
To make a long story long, I ended up facilitating one of these groups, and, by and large, I had a good time doing it. In spite of my growing up in a church that didn’t really place a high value on biblical literacy—in my entire life of going to Sunday school and confirmation and youth group, I never, not once, had to do a single sword drill—I really do love digging in and learning more about our scriptures and helping other people do the same. And all was well and good.
All was well and good until we got to Proverbs, that is.
I’m going to be honest with you. I never really know what to do with the Book of Proverbs. It’s a really weird book. There’s no narrative in it for me to follow along. It doesn’t tell me anything at first glance about the culture and context this collection of sayings came from. A lot of them are either super common sense—“the wages of the righteous lead to life; the earnings of the wicked lead to sin”1—don’t make any sense at all—“like a dog that returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats foolish mistakes”2—or don’t really mirror reality—“laziness brings poverty; hard work makes one rich”3.
And unlike Psalms, the other collection of writings in the Bible, Proverbs doesn’t have much in the way of devotional/worship material. I’m not going to turn to Proverbs in search of language for a prayer to use here in worship or in my own personal devotional practices. I mean, can you imagine? “Oh Lord, our God: Someone who is full refuses honey, but anything bitter tastes sweet to a hungry person.4 Amen.”
No! I’m telling you, Proverbs is a weird book!
And I think that’s because, even though they don’t seem like it on the surface, Proverbs and the sayings contained within it are hyper-contextual in nature. We like to think of our scriptures as being timeless and universally easily and plainly understood, but they’re not, and this is especially true of the wisdom literature that’s in the bible, including Proverbs. They tell us just as much about the context and culture and from which they arose as they do about the character and nature of God. They reflect the values and priorities of their time in ways that don’t always easily translate to our own 21st century context.
In a similar way, the proverbs that are more familiar to us in our context won’t make sense to people reading them 2,500 years from now. “Don’t feed the trolls”. “Don’t read the comments”. “The problem exists between the chair and the keyboard”.
Nevertheless, we too often only take these biblical proverbs on their face value, and we use them to support some pretty toxic ideas. And perhaps nothing exemplifies this as much as the very ending of the book, what we read earlier. The portrait of the virtuous wife.
Now, I recognize that there’s a certain irony in me preaching about the famed—or perhaps infamous—Proverbs 31 woman. I am many things, but I can say with a fair amount of certainty that I am not a woman, certainly not a Proverbs 31 woman at that. But I have been around long enough to see the way that that portrait has been used and viewed by faithful women across the theological spectrum.
It’s a poem that means a lot of things to a lot of people, women especially. I know that some feel genuinely empowered by the portrait—women who find their calling within those verses. Women who look at Proverbs 1-9 and 39 and see the whole book as being framed with a positive and strong feminine image.
And yet, I know that there are also plenty of women who look at the portrait of the virtuous wife in Proverbs 31 as a source of shame: an ideal foisted upon them by an overly patriarchal religion that they, for one reason or another, feel as though they can never attain.
And of course, there’s the feminist critique of Proverbs 31 as a depiction of the ideal woman as one that is rooted in the patriarchal values and customs of its culture. A woman who is objectified and can be bought and sold—even though she commands a high price. A woman who is exalted for her domestic work. A woman whose main purpose is to enrich her husband. A woman who, as scholar of Israelite and ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature Dr. Christine Yoder identifies in her commentary of Proverbs, “is heterosexual, married, and a mother.”5 (And to that, I would also add “able-bodied, cisgender, and wealthy”.)
And I could go on and on about the cottage industry of blogs and social media accounts and self-help books that has popped up and is focused on teaching young Christian girls and women how to be a “Proverbs 31 woman” and teaching men that there’s something wrong with their partner if they don’t look like the depiction presented in Proverbs 31. Go to the women’s section of any Lifeway and you’re bound to find a bible study curriculum or two on “Biblical Womanhood” heavily featuring Proverbs 31.
And yet, I think that each of these approaches to Proverbs 31 and the virtuous wife depicted therein ultimately fall into the trap I mentioned earlier. They take this poem on its face value, without recognizing that it was first preserved and received by a very particular context. When the scribes were preserving this poem in the scroll of Proverbs, they weren’t thinking about us reading it 2500 to 2000 years later in the year of our Lord 2021. No, they preserved it as wisdom for themselves. The original audience of the book of Proverbs was the learned male elite. Proverbs was intended for men to read and study.
And why does that matter? Because, again as Dr. Christine Yoder points out, this whole book is framed by two depictions of women as the standard of faithfulness.
The entire book of Proverbs is framed by two depictions of women as the model and standard of what it means to be a person of faith.
Wisdom personified in Proverbs 1-9 and this poem in Proverbs 31, put together, “envelop a book intended for men about living wisely in the everyday” with a celebration of the everyday enterprises of a woman—a celebration of “so-called ‘women’s work’”. Dr. Yoder notes,
Whether bartering in the marketplaces, weaving, trading, feeding and clothing others, planting vineyards, mixing wine, or burning the midnight oil, the labor of women is here elevated, theologically legitimated, and claimed as the preferable means of moral and theological instruction of the whole community.6
The preferable means of moral and theological instruction of the whole community.
In other words, "hey dudes, brochachos, my men," this book calls out, "maybe you should be more like the women in your lives."
And whether or not its timeless, I believe that this bit of wisdom is still timely. Because we still live in a patriarchal and misogynistic culture and context, even in the year of our Lord 2021. We still, societally, devalue women and their labor. Even though our entire concept of work and family life—the 40-hour, 5-day workweek—is dependent on a household of two where one person works and one person tends to the house, we all scoff and look down our noses at “domestic work”. We teach our boys that the worst thing that they can be called is anything that paints them in a feminine light, and we teach our girls that if they want to be successful they must, for all intents and purposes, cast off their femininity.
But Proverbs 31, when read fully in light of its historical context, tells us that we must flip the script. Our collective and societal flourishing depends on nothing less.
1 Proverbs 10:16
2 Proverbs 26:11
3 Proverbs 10:4
4 Proverbs 27:7
5 Yoder, Christine Roy. "Proverbs" in Women's Bible Commentary: Twentieth-Anniversary Edition edited by Carol A. Newsonm, Sharon H. Ringem, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012). 241.
6 Ibid, 241-242.
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