We’ve already touched briefly on the idea that reading passages of the Bible in context is an important tool in our study. We want to look at when and where the passage takes place in the Bible’s timeline. We can also find our understanding is enhanced and enriched by seeing how a passage fits with stories or events either side of it, and by starting to recognise biblical symbolism. In today’s post, we’re kind of combining all these skills, and looking at how seeing a whole book in the context of its place in the Bible’s big narrative, with the themes it picks up, can help us unlock a text that can be quite difficult.
But today, I’m letting someone else do the hard work!
Here’s the first part of a recent post by Jen Wilkin in which she shows how we often misread Proverbs (and can get very confused by it), because we take odd verses out of their context and try to apply them in ways they were never intended for:
Proverbs is easily one of the most widely quoted books of the Bible. Practical and poetic, it invites us to live God’s way in God’s world by pursuing the path of wisdom. But despite its popularity, Proverbs is also one of the most misunderstood and misapplied books.
In our therapeutic, self-help age, we may be tempted to reduce it to a reference book for successful living. But by correcting a few simple misconceptions, we can access the poetry and richness (and yes, usefulness!) the book has to offer. Here are three guidelines to shift our perspective for a better reading.
1. The book of Proverbs is cohesive, not disjointed.
Like all books of the Bible, Proverbs doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It contributes to the big story of the Bible. When we neglect to place it in that context, it’s often presented to us in disjointed parts. The first nine chapters turn into a sermon series for young men on how to avoid adultery. The collected sayings of chapters 10–30 are cherry-picked on an as-needed basis for a particular circumstance. And the final chapter with its famous Proverbs 31 Woman is set aside for women’s retreats and Mother’s Day messages. The first part is for the guys, the middle part is for all of us as needed, and the last part is for the ladies.
But when we place Proverbs in the context of the Old Testament, and of the Bible as a whole, we begin to see a cohesive structure emerge. The first nine chapters present us with two contrasting women: Folly and Wisdom. Folly is personified as a seductress and harlot. Wisdom is personified in a way ancient ears would recognize but modern ears often miss: as a bride. When Jesus tells the parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew 22, he borrows directly from the language of Proverbs 9, in which we hear Wisdom prepare a feast and send her servants out to invite guests.
It makes sense that a harlot and a bride would be the contrasting metaphors when we consider Israel’s history in the rest of the Old Testament. Israel was to be the bride of Yahweh, but instead she played the harlot with false gods. She embodied folly instead of wisdom. And the metaphor completes its redemptive arc in the book of Revelation, where we see Babylon the harlot set in contrast to Jerusalem the bride. One city embodies total folly, the other perfect wisdom. The Jerusalem descending from heaven like a bride promises that True Israel will indeed one day be presented pure to her bridegroom. And folly will go down to the grave.
When we keep the Bible’s big story in view, we read Proverbs differently. Rather than disjointed parts on various topics, Proverbs offers Yahweh’s children a choice of joining ourselves to Wisdom in marriage or to Folly in adultery in chapters 1–9. It then shows us Wisdom’s character in detail in the collected sayings of chapters 10–30, making a final plea that we choose the bride, Wisdom, in chapter 31—a bride whose virtues explicitly hark back to what we’ve seen detailed in the previous chapters.
Put another way: The first part pleads with us all to marry Wisdom, the middle part tells us how to recognize her, and the last part reiterates the plea to marry her. Does the book help us avoid literal adultery and choose or be literal godly wives? Of course! But it does much more than that.
The whole post is well worth reading and can be found on the Gospel Coalition website, here.
Notice how she picks up on imagery that appears elsewhere in the Bible, too, as we looked at a few weeks ago. When we see brides and banquets, we are meant to think about the great wedding feast that is to come. And if the Bride is the church worldwide, then not only do we see the teaching about wisdom as applying to each of us individually, but we should also be remembering that we are part of the church, and the wisdom teachings are for us corporately, too.
There’s no download this week, but if you’re not in the middle of studying something else, why not look closely at Proverbs 1 to 9 and see if you can spot the bridal imagery used? Or compare Proverbs 9 and Matthew 22 to see how Jesus picked up on the former in his parable.
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This post is part of a series of ideas for how to get started with studying the Bible either for yourself or as a small group leader. Follow this link to find the other posts in the series.
