Proverbs; or, the Poor Richard's Almanack of the Old Testament.
Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise—Poor Richard
A slothful man will not catch his prey, but the diligent man will get precious wealth—Proverbs 12:27
Though the Book of Proverbs resembles an anthology—an assembly of unconnected sayings—it's possible to detect a prevailing theme, and it's this: the prudent and wise live long and prosper, while reckless fools suffer the opposite fate. One recognizes this theme from, for example, the Deuteronomic historian, who describes a period of national hardship leading to obedience and faith, which begets success and prosperity, the enjoyment of which tends to diminish religious devotion, which is the cause of new misfortunes, then another religious awakening, and on and on, an endless cycle and a "theory of history." But notice that, in the world of Deuteronomy, prosperity or adversity is contingent upon obedience to God's commandments, whereas in Proverbs it's quite a secular brand of conformity that is recommended for advancement. It's not as if I had to hunt around to turn up Proverbs 12:27, "wisdom" one might subscribe to without having any particular view about bondage in Egypt, the exodus, delivery into the promised land, God's covenant with his people. Israel's faith is founded upon God's historical acts, which aren't mentioned in Proverbs. According to the Deuteronomist, you should behave this way and not that way because the former has been commanded by God, the latter forbidden, and he is watching still, active in history, punishing and rewarding. In the Proverbs, God seems at a remove, on sabbatical, and you should behave this way and not that way only because, presumably, you are a prudent person who wants to enjoy an agreeable life.
The Proverbs are open to the same kind of criticism that was leveled at Ben Franklin, the compiler of Poor Richard's almanac. When a statue honoring Franklin was unveiled, James Russell Lowell wrote:
[W]e shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston . . . and that he moved to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance . . . and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved is a penny lost, or something of the kind.
Such thin gruel, in other words, that getting the details exactly wrong has no effect. By genre, the Proverbs are, like Job and Ecclesiastes, "wisdom literature," but there the resemblance ends. Here's another representative Proverb (12:21):
No ill befalls the righteous,
but the wicked are filled with trouble.
Isn't it pretty to think so! This is the "wisdom" that is explicitly rejected in those other wisdom books, angrily and defiantly in Job, wearily but firmly in Ecclesiastes. If one were to judge the merits of Old Testament writings by strictly literary standards, the high points would be much of Genesis, the court history in II Samuel, the Book of Jonah, many of the Psalms, and, in the category of wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes and Job. The major prophetic works of Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as three of the so-called minor prophets—Amos, Micah, and Hosea—command attention also. In comparison to all of these, the Book of Proverbs sounds like Polonius.
So that would be the brief for the prosecution—which I endorse, but not wholly. One occasionally receives, while wading through, a pleasing jolt. The source, when this happens, is often an unexpected turn.
Like a gold ring in a swine's snout
is a beautiful woman without discretion.
The two-part construction is characteristic, but the effect varies considerably. Very often—too often—part two completes the thought of part one in pat and predictable fashion. It seems there are a million like "the wise do x; the foolish, the opposite of x" or "x yields good results; and nothing good comes from x's opposite." So the jaded reader, coming to
A foolish son is ruin to his father
finds his brain filling in line two with
but a wise son elevates the family
or some such ticky-tackiness, and for this reason the reward is all the greater when, in this case, the eye, catching up, corrects the brain's sneering guess with
and a wife's quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain.
Maybe it's just me, but, among the more vivid and memorable of the Proverbs, it seems an overrepresented subject concerns relations between the sexes. In chapter 30, essentially an appendix in which the sayings drop the two-part parallel construction in favor of more spacious expression, one reads, at verses 18 and 19:
Three things are too wonderful for me;
four I do not understand:
the way of an eagle in the sky,
the way of a serpent on a rock,
the way of a ship on the high seas,
and the way of a man with a maiden.
The Proverbs are frequently quoted by those who wish to endow their prim morality with the authority of Scripture, which I guess is their right, but the tactic may have been anticipated:
Like a lame man's legs, which hang useless,
is a proverb in the mouth of fools. —Proverbs 26:7
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