The Wisdom of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes – Derek Kidner
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But now he must relate it to the world at large, to the scene spread out on every side: from what lies right at his feet (shrewdly pointed out in Proverbs) to what is barely visible at the horizon – the dark riddle of how the world is governed (the book of Job) and how it should be valued (Ecclesiastes).
Proverbs
Page 20
But appeal will be made to the teaching and discipline of both father and mother (Proverbs 1:9; 6:20), and at one point the grandparents come fondly into remembrance as well (4:3). Not only in these early chapters but in every section of the book it is assumed that truth is to be learnt first at home, instilled there with firmness and affection as lessons for the mind and training for the character.
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The home remains the place from which this teaching emanates, and whatever threatens its integrity is viewed here with profound concern.
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Two such threats are given special treatment. First, in 1:10-19 (cf. 4:14-19), there is the fatal appeal of the gang to the restlessness of youth.
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Secondly, there is the more subtle threat of sexual temptation…The point is that she [the temptress] has put herself outside the loyalties and structures of society and the laws of God, and owes her disruptiveness and much of her fascination to that intriguing fact.
Page 23
Or again, she is Lady Bountiful, with everything to give, from riches to honour to righteousness and life itself (Proverbs 3:15-18, 8:18-21, 35); and her feast, like that of the gospel, is for the hungriest and the least promising. “To him who is without sense she says, “Come, east…and drink….Leave…, and live, and walk in the way of insight”’(9:4-6).
Page 45
Proverbs 31:1-9 (The Words of King Lemuel’s mother
This again is a direct address, in the imperative mood. Its vocational emphasis (on kingship, not on general morality) brings it especially close to the pattern of extra-biblical Instructions, since these were addressed to budding administrators, including (in the case of Amenemhet and Merikare) future kings. So, while other hortatory instructions in Proverbs point out the universal perils of loose living (e.g. Proverbs 5 on promiscuous sex; 23:29ff. on drunkenness), and the universal duty of compassion (e.g. 24:11-12), this one puts them in the special context of power and the heightened obligations which it brings. It spells out the principle of Luke 12:48 (‘much given…much required’) with maternal outspokenness!
Job
Page 56
Even in our encounter with Proverbs it emerged that our best and soundest recipes for success can only be provisional, since our management of life is limited by what exists around us, within us, and, decisively, above us. ‘How then can man understand his way?’ (Proverbs 20:24) was a question which even that book of confident answers had to raise at some point.
But in Job, what was no more than a passing cloud in Proverbs now blots out the very sky. Instead of a simple reminder of human ignorance, what faces us here is the urgent problem of divine justice.
Page 61
A closer look at the material shows that the basic error of Job’s friends is that they overestimate their grasp of truth, misapply the truth they know, and close their minds to any facts that contradict what they assume. That being so, if the book is attacking anything its target is not the familiar doctrines of other Scriptures, such as God’s justice and benevolence, his care for the righteous and the punishment of the wicked, or the general law that what one sows one reaps. Rather, it attacks the arrogance of pontificating about the application of these truths, and of thereby misrepresenting God and misjudging one’s fellow men. To put it more positively, the book shows (by its context, the opening scene in heaven) how small a part of any situation is the fragment we see; how much of what we do see we ignore or distort through preconceptions; and how unwise it is to extrapolate from our elementary grasp of truth.
Job’s well-meaning comforters demonstrate the force of this by straying ever further from reality as they pursue their fixed ideas of suffering as punitive or, at best, purgative. Shocked, instead of shaken, by Job’s denials that his suffering is deserved, they pass from gentle probings for some hidden sin, to stern rebukes for his intemperate language (e.g. Job 15), and finally inventing a fictitious catalogue of crimes for him (22:5ff.). To reinforce this, they paint idealized pictures of a world of prosperous saints and destitute sinners, brushing aside all contrary examples. And to magnify God’s holiness they are driven to adding to it the element of royal disdain, so that he distrusts the very angels, finds fault with the starry skies, and regards humanity as worms and maggots (15:15f.; 25:5f.). Small wonder that in the epilogue God charges them with folly and slander (42:8).
Ecclesiastes
Page 93
The Book as Qoheleth’s Challenge to the Secularist
G.S. Hendry has expressed this view as follows:
‘Qoheleth writes from concealed premises, and his book is in reality a major work of apologetic or ‘eristic’ theology. Its apparent worldliness is dictated by its aim: Qoheleth is addressing the general public whose view is bounded by the horizons of this world; he meets them on their own ground, and proceeds to convict them of its inherent vanity…His book is in fact a critique of secularism and of secularized religiong.’
Looked at in this way, the shafts of light that we have noticed are signals to the reader that the author’s own position and conclusions are very different from those of the secularist, in whose shoes he is standing for the purpose of his thesis. Without these signals and their final confirmation (12:13-14) the book would simply preach despair, or at best a mere whistling in the dark. But with them, it is saying that the abyss of final vanity is the destination of every road but one.
Page 96
Judge of All
This is double-edged. It has its terror for the wicked (8:13) and its warning for the exuberant (11:9), and there are moments when it could be simply reminding us that all things alike are under a death sentence (3:17 ff.). But in the context of life’s injustices and apparent lack of meaning, the fact that justice will at last be done (8:10-13; 12:14) is not bad news but good. As I have remarked elsewhere, in Ecclesiastes we have faced ‘the appalling inference that nothing has meaning, nothing matters under the sun. It is then that we can hear, as the good news which it is, that everything matters – “for God will bring every deed into judgment…”’.
Page 100
As J.S. Whale put it in a notable Cambridge Lecture, ‘If death means that all is over and there is nothing more, it is life which is pervaded with tragic irrationality. Every column in the great human tot-book adds up to precisely the same result, Zero.’
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Two turns of speech, however, keep reminding us that these modest pleasures are not goals to live for, but bonuses or consolations to be gratefully accepted. First, they are ‘from the hand of God’, and to be taken as such with a clear conscience (‘for God has already approved what you do’, 9:7; i.e., as the author of these joys he has shown his pleasure in them). This is very different from a defiant hedonism. Secondly – and this is the other ‘constant’ in Qoheleth’s thought – these joys, however innocent, are passing, like all else that is ‘under the sun’. So they too are subject to ‘vanity’. There can be not pretence that they are more than palliatives, brightening ‘the few days of (one’s) life’, the ‘vain life which he has given you under the sun’ (5:18; 9:9).
Page 101
The common-sense sayings are too numerous to be simply foils for the occasional paradox or dark thought. Their role is positive and bracing: to show that there is much that can be done by plain good sense, since all too many of our troubles are of our own making. Just as the brevity of life is no reason to reject its joys (as we have seen), so its blows and hazards are no argument against using our intelligence to mitigate them. The only proviso is that we treat this as a mitigation, not an answer. The deeper questions remain.
Page 103
Two questions, if not three, arise here. First, do Qoheleths, own words end with verse 8? The way they echo his opening suggests this strongly, and the commending of his work to the reader in verses 9-12 has the sound of a new voice (compare verse 10 with John 21:24b). The remaining verses are no less authoritative, as canonical Scripture, for that.
Secondly, does ‘Vanity of vanities’ cancel the positive thrust of ‘Remember your Creator’ and the equally positive ‘end of the matter’ in verses 13-14? To answer this we should notice that such a sequence is typical of Qoheleth’s overall method, which is to present a prevailing picture of earthly futility and tragedy, almost (yet not wholly) unrelieved by any glimmer of light. Where other writers would commend the light to us directly, Qoheleth does it by making the darkness intolerable, allowing the light only the rarest gleam to provoke the observant into second thoughts. ‘Remember your Creator’ is, apart from the clear daylight of the epilogue, the last of these moments before the clouds close in again; and on this occasion Qoheleth is explicit in his warning that they will indeed close in, and his appeal for right relationship with God before they do.
But this leads to the third question, namely what answer even such a relationship can give to a prospect of universal death. Qoheleth, by insisting that God is a judge of every act (8:11-13) and every man (3:17), brings eternity to bear on us, even though time, without that dimension, destroys us. It follows that nothing is meaningless, for God assesses it; and no-one is forgotten, however short may be the human memory.
This is exceedingly far-reaching. Nothing less than this can answer the nihilism, the ‘vanity of vanities’, with which Qoheleth faithfully confronts the merely earthbound. If every act, every person, matters to the eternal God, man can play his part in earnest. Nothing will go unregarded, unremembered or unvalued. But beyond this Qoheleth will not venture. To the question of whether human death has any different sequel from that of animals his answer is, ‘Who knows?’ (3:21), and this must control the meaning we assign to 12:7, ‘the spirit returns to God who gave it’. As in Psalm 104:29-30, it will speak only of the breath, or spirit (ruah, as here), which God lends to man and beast alike.
Page 104
‘The end of the matter’ (12:13-14) makes no breakthrough into such a hope [eternal life], but it does bring into full view what has earlier been glimpsed only fitfully and, for the most part, in deep shadow. Now the fear of God emerges as not merely man’s duty (that word has been supplied by translators) but as his very raison d’être; and the judgment of God has, as it must have, the last word.
Qoheleth’s summarizer has not failed his author.
[per footnote: Strictly the phrase in 12:13b means ‘for this is every man’ – a concentrated way of saying, “every man is destined for, and show be wholly absorbed in, this – A.H. McNeile, An Introduction to Ecclesiastes, p. 94]
Page 115
Thus Qoheleth holds up the mirror to man, showing him the transience of his work and the fact that God’s works alone endures. This is the corrective which man needs to his perennial conviction that he can make unlimited progress; for until the end of the age and the break-in of God’s full reign, Paul’s words in Romans 8:20ff still apply to us. But whereas Qoheleth can only say that God’s work alone will last, Paul proclaims that God has acted in Christ, and that the groaning and travail of the present age will not be in vain.
Comparing the three
Page 116
Between them, the three books clearly cover three aspects of existence which no-one can afford to overlook: the demands of practical good management; the enigma of calamities that are beyond control or explanation; and the tantalizing hollowness and brevity of human life.
Page 122
Qoheleth’s godly ‘Yes’ on this point, whatever contradictions the present vanity may suggest, must be given eventually the last word – which means that his book will end, through the inspired insight of his editor, where Proverbs had begun: with the fear of the LORD God who weighs up every deed and motive. The Alpha of Proverbs has become the Omega of Ecclesiastes.
Page 123
For all his questionings, he has no quarrel with conservative wisdom, as long as it is not the means of hiding from us the darker facts of life which it is his mission to expose.
Some international reflections
Page 128
Thou shouldst not supervise (too closely) thy wife when thou knowest that she is efficient. Do not say to her: ‘Where is it? Fetch (it) for us!’ when she has put (it) in the (most) useful place…Recognize her abilities. How happy it is when they hand is with her! Many…do not know what a man should do to stop dissension in his house… [Ani (ANET, p. 421a)
Page 129
Do not marry a prostitute, whose husbands are legion,...
When you have trouble, she will not support you,
When you have a dispute she will be a mocker.
There is no reverence or submissiveness in her….
…She pricks up her ears for the footsteps of another man [ANET, p. 595b]
Page 131
Strong words from schoolmasters:
Spend no day in idleness or thou wilt be beaten. The ear of a boy is on his back, and he hearkens when he is beaten. [Pap. Lansing 19f. (Caminos, p. 377)]
Advice to parents:
My son, withhold not they son from stripes: for the beating of a boy is like manure to a garden, and like rope to an ass. [Ahikar 2:22 (Charles, p. 732)]
