Proverbs: Where Parables Come From

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Tradition says Solomon. The book itself names other authors too: the words of the wise, the men of King Hezekiah who copied sayings, a man named Agur and the mother of a king named Lemuel.

When: The collections grew from the time of the kings to after the exile. The book reached its final form around the 400s or 300s BC.

Where it fits: Tradition ties it to Solomon’s Jerusalem, where he spoke three thousand proverbs (1 Kings 4:29–34). Sayings were added in Hezekiah’s day (Proverbs 25:1; 2 Kings 18–20), and the book took its final shape after the exile.

Where I quote it: My advice to take the lowest seat at a wedding feast follows Proverbs 25:6–7 (Luke 14:8–11). I spoke of Wisdom as a woman, justified by her children (Matthew 11:19) or by all her children (Luke 7:35).

If you only read three chapters: Proverbs 8, Proverbs 22 and Proverbs 31.

Words to Know

Proverb — in Hebrew mashal. The same word can mean a parable, a byword, a taunt or a comparison.

Wisdom — in Hebrew hokmah. In this book she is a woman who calls out in the streets.

Fool — not a stupid person, but someone who will not listen and does what he likes.

Amenemope — an Egyptian teacher whose book of advice shares many sayings with Proverbs.

The Book in Brief

Proverbs is a collection of collections. Most of it is short sayings, usually two lines long, in which the second line answers or sharpens the first. The book names its sources as it goes.

Chapters 1 to 9 are different. They are a long speech by a father or teacher to my son. He urges the young man to chase wisdom, to avoid friends who offer easy money by violence, and to stay away from a seductive woman whose house leads to death. Wisdom herself appears as a woman who calls aloud at the street corners and the city gates. In chapter 8 she says that she was with God before the world was made. Chapter 9 ends with two feasts. Wisdom sets a table and invites the simple to come in, and a woman called Folly sits at her door and calls out to the same passersby.

Chapters 10 to 22 are the proverbs of Solomon proper, hundreds of sayings set side by side with no plot connecting them. They set the honest against the crooked, the hard worker against the lazy one, and careful speech against gossip, and they take up money, family, anger and kings. A section called the words of the wise follows, with thirty sayings, and then a few more from the same wise men.

Chapters 25 to 29 are more proverbs of Solomon, copied out by the men of King Hezekiah. They are full of comparisons from daily life, with warnings about fools, lazy people and quarrels, and advice for dealing with rulers.

Chapter 30 is the words of Agur: riddles, sayings built on counting things in threes and fours, and a prayer to be given neither poverty nor riches. Chapter 31 opens with the words of King Lemuel, which his mother taught him, about ruling justly and speaking up for the poor. The book ends with a poem about a worthy woman, each line beginning with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet.

When I taught in parables, I was not inventing a new way to teach. My people already had a word for it: mashal. It means a proverb, a parable, a comparison, a short saying that makes you think. The book of Proverbs is called Mishle, the meshalim of Solomon.¹

So this book is where my way of teaching comes from. Short. Earthy. Drawn from fields and kitchens and money and family. Easy to remember and hard to forget.

Take the lower seat

Here is one I came close to repeating.

Proverbs: Don’t exalt yourself in the presence of the king, or claim a place among great men; for it is better that it be said to you, “Come up here,” than that you should be put lower in the presence of the prince (Proverbs 25:6–7).

Me, at a dinner where I watched the guests jostling for the best seats: When you are invited by anyone to a wedding feast, don’t sit in the best seat … go and sit in the lowest place, so that when he who invited you comes, he may tell you, ‘Friend, move up higher.’ (Luke 14:8–10).

Then I went one step further than Proverbs. I told my host that when he gives a banquet, he should not invite his friends or rich neighbors who can invite him back, but the poor, the maimed, the lame, or the blind (Luke 14:13).

Borrowed from Egypt

In 1923, scholars published an Egyptian text called the Instruction of Amenemope, advice from a father to a son, written centuries before Solomon. When they read it beside Proverbs, they found that one section of Proverbs, especially 22:17 to 23:11, follows it closely.²

Amenemope has thirty chapters. Proverbs 22:20 asks, Haven’t I written to you thirty excellent things of counsel and knowledge …?

Amenemope says not to move the boundary marker of a field and not to rob the poor. Proverbs says, Don’t exploit the poor, because he is poor (Proverbs 22:22) and Don’t move the ancient boundary stone (Proverbs 23:10).

My people took good advice from Egypt, the land of their slavery, and put it in their scriptures. Wisdom crossed borders. They did not mind.

Go deeperEgyptian parallels, and who came first

The match with Amenemope goes beyond boundary stones. Proverbs warns, Don’t weary yourself to be rich. In your wisdom, show restraint. Why do you set your eyes on that which is not? For it certainly sprouts wings like an eagle and flies in the sky (Proverbs 23:4–5). The Egyptian teacher says that riches make themselves wings like geese and fly off to the sky. Both books also say that their lessons will let a young man give a sound answer to whoever sent him (Proverbs 22:21).³

Who copied whom? Amenemope is usually dated to the late second millennium BC, long before Proverbs reached its present form. It is also one tightly built work of thirty chapters, while the Hebrew parallels are scattered through one section of a larger collection. For those reasons most scholars think the Hebrew writer knew the Egyptian text, or something close to it, and reworked it for his own people. A few have argued for a shared older source.²

How would a teacher in Jerusalem have come across an Egyptian book? The two lands were close neighbors. The book of Kings says that Solomon married Pharaoh’s daughter (1 Kings 3:1) and that his wisdom surpassed all the wisdom of Egypt (1 Kings 4:30). Egyptians had been writing instructions from a father to his son for well over a thousand years before Solomon, and the “my son” speeches at the start of Proverbs are the same kind of writing.

Lady Wisdom

In the first nine chapters, Wisdom is a woman. She stands at the street corners and the city gates and calls out to anyone passing. How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity? (Proverbs 1:22).

In Proverbs 8, she says something astonishing. She was there before the world was made. The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his work … when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was the craftsman by his side. I was a delight day by day (Proverbs 8:22, 29–30).

Then she builds a house, sets a table and sends out her servant girls to invite everyone: Come, eat some of my bread, Drink some of the wine which I have mixed! (Proverbs 9:5).

I spoke of Wisdom as she. When people called John a demon-possessed man for fasting and called me a glutton and a drunkard for feasting, I said, Wisdom is justified by her children (Matthew 11:19). Luke remembers it as by all her children (Luke 7:35).

And when John wrote his gospel, he began, In the beginning was the Word … All things were made through him (John 1:1, 3). Many scholars think he was thinking of Wisdom, who was beside God at creation.⁴

That verse, The LORD possessed me, later became a key text in one of the biggest fights in church history. The Greek translation the early church read has “The Lord created me.” In the 300s, a priest named Arius said it proved that I was created, and so less than God. His opponents said it meant something else. The fight led to the Council of Nicaea.⁵ A line about Lady Wisdom at a street corner became the center of an argument about me.

Go deeperCraftsman or child? One word nobody can settle

When Wisdom says in Proverbs 8:30 that she was the craftsman by his side, the Hebrew word is amon. It appears nowhere else in the Bible, and nobody is sure what it means.

For most of its history Hebrew was written with consonants only. The vowel marks in our Hebrew Bibles were added by Jewish scribes in the early Middle Ages.⁶ With the vowels they gave it, amon means a craftsman or master builder. With other vowels the same letters would mean a child being raised, a nursling. The next words suit the child: I was a delight day by day, always rejoicing before him. But the verses just before suit the craftsman, because God is marking out the foundations of the earth.

Ancient readers split. The Greek Septuagint uses a word that means arranging or fitting together. Jerome’s Latin Bible, around AD 400, says she was “arranging all things.” The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek book written probably in Alexandria, calls Wisdom the one who fashioned all things (Wisdom of Solomon 7:21; 8:6). The early Jewish commentary Genesis Rabbah begins with this verse and reads amon as craftsman. The Torah, it says, was God’s plan for the world, as a king who builds a palace works from an architect’s drawings.

Modern commentators still divide, some for craftsman and some for nursling. Either picture puts Wisdom at the beginning, beside God, when the world was made. That is the point the book wants you to take.

What Proverbs says about the poor

Proverbs is often read as a book of tips for getting ahead. Read what it says about the poor.

He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for his Maker, but he who is kind to the needy honors him (Proverbs 14:31).

He who has pity on the poor lends to the LORD; he will reward him (Proverbs 19:17).

Whoever stops his ears at the cry of the poor, he will also cry out, but shall not be heard (Proverbs 21:13).

And this, which is a description, not a recommendation: The rich rule over the poor. The borrower is servant to the lender (Proverbs 22:7).

When I said that whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me (Matthew 25:40), Proverbs had already said that kindness to the poor is a loan to God.

Give me neither poverty nor riches

Near the end there is a prayer by a man named Agur:

Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full, deny you, and say, ‘Who is the LORD?’ or lest I be poor, and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God (Proverbs 30:8–9).

Food that is needful. Not more. When I taught my friends to ask for their daily bread, Agur’s prayer was already old.

Proverbs are not promises

Here is something that will save you a great deal of grief.

Proverbs are true the way proverbs are true. They describe how things usually go. They are not guarantees.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it (Proverbs 22:6). Good advice. Not a promise that no child of good parents will ever go wrong.

The book tells you this itself. Look at two verses side by side: Don’t answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. And the very next verse: Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes (Proverbs 26:4–5).

Which is it? Both. It depends on the fool and the moment. That is what wisdom is: knowing which proverb fits.

When people turn Proverbs into promises, that the righteous will always be rich and the wicked will always fall, they end up as Job’s friends, telling suffering people it is their own fault. Job and Ecclesiastes are in my scriptures to keep Proverbs honest.

And one more thing. Spare the rod and spoil the child is not in the Bible. It is an old English saying, made famous by a comic poem of the 1660s. The proverb is One who spares the rod hates his son (Proverbs 13:24).⁷

A mother’s advice to a king

The book ends with two women.

First, the advice a king named Lemuel learned from his mother. Do not give your strength to women or wine. And then: Open your mouth for the mute, in the cause of all who are left desolate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and serve justice to the poor and needy (Proverbs 31:8–9).

Then comes a poem about a worthy woman, each verse starting with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. She buys a field and plants a vineyard with her own earnings. She trades. She works through the night. And she opens her arms to the poor; yes, she extends her hands to the needy (Proverbs 31:16, 20).

The book that began with Woman Wisdom calling in the street ends with a working woman with open arms.

Go deeperHezekiah’s men, Agur and Lemuel

The second large collection in Proverbs begins, These also are proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out (Proverbs 25:1). Hezekiah ruled around 700 BC, when Assyria had destroyed the northern kingdom and threatened Jerusalem (2 Kings 18–19). He was a builder. His workmen cut a tunnel through the rock under Jerusalem to bring water inside the walls (2 Kings 20:20). In 1880 an inscription was found near the end of that tunnel. It is written in Hebrew, and by the shape of its letters it belongs to about 700 BC. It tells how the diggers cut toward each other from both ends until they broke through. It shows that Jerusalem had trained writers in the very years when this verse says the king’s men were copying proverbs.⁸

The last two voices in the book belong to strangers. Nobody else in the Bible is named Agur or Lemuel. The word translated the revelation (Proverbs 30:1; 31:1) is massa in Hebrew. It can mean a message or a burden, but it is also a place name. Massa was a son of Ishmael (Genesis 25:14), and his name belongs to an Arabian people. Tiglath-pileser III, king of Assyria from 745 to 727 BC, lists them among those who paid him tribute.⁹

If massa is a name here, then Agur and Lemuel came from Arabia, and the scriptures kept their sayings without comment. Many commentators think so. Others keep the older reading, “revelation.” Either way, the book is plainly the work of many hands: kings and scribes, a mother, a father, and teachers from other lands.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Proverbs 25:6–7, then Luke 14:7–11.

You will find: the same advice about the lower seat, a thousand years apart.

Then read Proverbs 26:4–5. Two proverbs in a row that say opposite things.

The Short Version

• The Hebrew word for proverb is the same as parable. This book is where my way of teaching comes from.
• One section closely follows an Egyptian book, the Instruction of Amenemope.
• Lady Wisdom was with God at creation. John’s “In the beginning was the Word” draws on her.
• Proverbs says oppressing the poor shows contempt for God and kindness to the poor is a loan to God.
• Proverbs are not promises. The book even puts two opposite sayings side by side.