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Old Testament Basics - Lesson 09.
Dr. Sid Buzzell.

Lesson Nine.
In this lesson, we introduce the Old Testament's wisdom literature. Now it's important to understand that the whole Old Testament and New Testament contain wisdom. From Genesis to Malachi, from Matthew to Revelation, the purpose of these writers is to help us understand that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

But there are three books in the Old Testament that focus so much on wisdom that we actually call them the "wisdom literature." The books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are usually referred to as the wisdom literature in the Old Testament. But before we look at these books, let's take a few minutes and talk about wisdom. What is it?

The Hebrew word is chokmâh, and it was used throughout the Old Testament to talk about people who did things with skill. The basic meaning of the word chokmâh or châkam is skill. It was used to describe the people who embroidered the priest's garments back in the book of Exodus. These garments were to be beautiful; they were to represent the nature and work of God.

So when they selected people to do that embroidery, they selected people who didn't just do embroidery, they did it with châkam, great skill, so that other people who did embroidery would look at the priest's garment and say, "Now that's embroidery." It's also the people who did the metal work on the tabernacle, who were chosen specifically because they did metal work with châkam, with skill.

People who parented well, people who administrated well, people who led well, various things that people could do with great skill, with great dexterity, they did with châkam. The noun form of that is chokmâh. And when we come to the book of Proverbs, for instance, and we read over and over again about wisdom, it is this word châkam or chokmâh.

What Solomon was saying is that when you see a person living life with wisdom, their whole life is characterized by skill. And just as a person who does embroidery would look at the embroidery on the priest's garment, just as somebody who does metal work would look at the metal work on the tabernacle, the Old Testament tabernacle and say, "Now that's how it ought to be done. I do metal work but I wish I could do it like that." Well, as people looked at a human life and saw how that person related to other people, saw how that person related to their work, saw how that person parented, how that person functioned as a spouse, how that person managed their money, everything about that person they would say, "That person lives life with chokmâh. I think that's how life ought to be lived."

But most especially in the Old Testament wisdom literature as we see how a person relates to God and how that person's relationship with God bleeds out through every other aspect of their life, we say, "That's wisdom." So when you think of wisdom and you read the book of Proverbs, and you read the book of Ecclesiastes, and you read the book of Job, these books that are given to wisdom, what God is showing us in these three books is this is how life is lived with beauty, with balance, with dexterity. This is how life ought to be lived.

That's why Proverbs 1:7 and Proverbs 9:10 become such crucial statements, because in these two places, Proverbs 1:7 and Proverbs 9:10, we read that, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning." Until we have a right way of thinking about God and we see God for who God is, for who God says He is, and we see ourselves for who we are, for who God says we are, and we get that relationship squared away, that's the first step of living a wise life.
And that's really what the whole Bible is about: How do we live this wise life? The Prophets, for instance, tell us God's perspective on our world and how we actually live a wise life or a foolish life by reading those sermons in the prophets. The Psalms lead us to love and worship God so that we will trust Him enough to live life the way He tells us it ought to be lived.

The narrative literature, what we've been calling the chronological books, the time books, the books that tell us the story, they're full of stories, absolutely full of stories of people who did follow God and live a wise life and people who refused to follow God and lived a foolish life; and we see the value of living the life well as God teaches us and the folly of living life as a fool.

And so as we read throughout this whole Old Testament, we understand that passage after passage is helping us come to this point where we trust God enough to live life with chokmâh, with skill, with wisdom.

So when we refer to the Old Testament wisdom books, we must hear three things. First of all, wisdom is about living life with skill. And in the Old Testament sense, you can't possibly live life with skill, with wisdom, unless you have a proper fear of the Lord. Secondly, there are three books, Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, that are primarily given to teaching us wisdom. And third, we understand that while Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes are the wisdom books, that they are certainly not the only books that communicate wisdom and teach us how to live a wise life.

What I'd like to do in the rest of this lesson is focus in on these three books of wisdom,  Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, because they make an enormous contribution to us about how we can live life with beauty and balance and texture, with wisdom, with skill.

The book of Proverbs is primarily a collection of wise sayings. Most of them were written by Solomon, but not all of them. That's another misconception. People think Solomon wrote all of the Proverbs. He wrote the majority of them. He collected many others from other wisdom literature, from other wise sages. Some of them were collected by others. So as you read the book of Proverbs, you'll see headings periodically as you're reading along that introduce other people who either wrote or collected some of this wisdom literature.

Proverbs 1:1-7 is a particularly important section because it introduces in condensed form the purpose of the Proverbs. And as we said about poetry, if you don't understand how poetry works, if you don't understand how the Proverbs work, you don't read them with maximum contribution.

It begins this way, "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel." And then there's a series of infinitives. Now if it's been a long time since you had English, an infinitive is a word that introduces a purpose. It's usually introduced by the word to. Listen to this: "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel. To know wisdom and instruction, to discern the sayings of understanding, to receive instruction, to give prudence . . . to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles."

So you see, these infinitives introduce the purpose of Proverbs really as twofold. One is to give us wisdom, but secondly the Proverbs are like a mental gymnasium. The Proverbs being poetry are set up with two lines usually, once in a while more, but usually two lines that work together to produce a thought. And like other poetry, the meaning is in the middle. And the writer of Proverbs had to develop two skills. The first was an astute observation of life. These were wise sages. They looked at life and they saw how life worked and they wanted to capture the lessons that they saw in life.

But then the second skill was an ability to cleverly craft that observation into a proverb, into a poetic structure that forced the reader to ask what is the meaning of the first line, what is the meaning of the second line, and as I put these two lines together what is the truth that comes out of that process?
Proverbs many, many times don't give up their meaning easily. They say to the reader: you're going to have to work at this, because the mind is a muscle. And just like a bodybuilder will go into the gym and lift those weights to build those muscles, the wise person goes into the gymnasium of Proverbs and works that mental muscle to strengthen it.

So if you read a proverb, and it doesn't make sense to you right away, that's by design. So if you're a lazy reader, if you're not serious about learning, many of these proverbs will never yield up their meaning to you. So my invitation to you is the same as my invitation to me, if you want to live a wise life, you've got to cultivate wisdom. And if you're going to cultivate wisdom, you're going to have to work at it.

So don't blame the Proverbs if you read one and you say, "Huh?" That's by design, that's your challenge, that's my challenge to meditate, to prayerfully think my way through, "What is the message here?"

Another truth about Proverbs is their title. Some people come and say, "You know I read that proverb. It says, ‘Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.' I trained up my child in a way he should go, and God promised me." I say, "Now wait, wait, wait, where did you read that?" "Oh, in the book of Proverbs." I say, "Well, the title of the book isn't Promises, it's Proverbs." These are wise observations of life, which say you increase the probability of a child who doesn't depart from God's way if you raise the child in that way. You increase the probability of gathering wealth if you work hard and invest wisely. You increase the probability of having a good relationship with your children, or with your spouse, if you relate to them in the way that the Proverbs say is a wise way to relate.

But it doesn't guarantee it. It just says you increase the probability of that happening. So don't misunderstand and call these promises. Read them, follow them, but understand they are not guarantees. You and I do not control life.

The Proverbs divide into two. The book of Proverbs divides itself into two large sections. Chapters 1–9 are an introduction to the Proverbs. It's written in poetry. Many of those poetic statements in there read like proverbs, and they are, but in those first nine chapters we find long sections that fit together. It flows.

The poetic verses combine to make a longer statement in those first nine chapters. And what Solomon is doing in those chapters is introducing us to the actual proverbial literature. And the actual proverbs begin in chapter 1 and go through chapter 31 . So read it that way. Many sections of chapters 10–31 are self-contained. Each verse is a self-contained unit, but that's not always the case.

So as you're reading in the second part of Proverbs, look for those proverbs that string together. Proverbs 31 , for instance, is a series of proverbs, but it strings together. It holds together into a larger unit of thought. So as you're reading, as you see proverbs that seem similar to you, see that as a string of proverbs.

The book of Ecclesiastes is another of those books like the Song of Solomon that have driven people crazy for years. What in the world is the writer doing with that? It seems to be so difficult. It seems to make life so hopeless, so meaningless. In fact, the theme introduced in verse 2 of the book of Ecclesiastes says, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." And that word "vanity" means vapor, life is "poof," you just get it figured out and it changes on you. You just get things moving in the right way, and it does a U-turn on you.

In fact, the whole book of Ecclesiastes is full of twists and turns and dead-end streets and contradictions. And you read a statement that says one thing; you read the next passage it seems to say exactly the opposite. It's a very troubling book. In fact, the way we outline the book of Ecclesiastes, the first section says, "Life is beyond comprehension. You will never figure it out. So what you have to do is learn to live a happy life in a world you will never fully understand."

The second part of the book of Ecclesiastes says, "You will never control life. Life is out of our control. Learn to live a happy life in a world you cannot control." Now you may be saying, "Wait a minute, didn't you just say the book of Proverbs says that I do have some control, that I increase the probability of being happy with my adult children if I invest in them as young children? Doesn't the book of Proverbs say that if I live a wise life that it will be a happier life and a more enriched life?"

Yeah, Proverbs does say that, and there is truth to that, that I do have some control over my life. But what drives some people to distraction, to extreme frustration, is the reality that life doesn't always work like Proverbs says.
I think if we read the book of Proverbs and we read the book of Ecclesiastes as two ends of a spectrum, we have a better understanding of what life is like. The wise person says, "I do need to live my life in certain ways because it does increase the probability that my life will be a good life." But the wise person also says, "But you know there are so many parts of life I just don't understand, and I'm going to have to learn how to live happily in a world I don't understand. And no matter how much I invest in my life, I've discovered that I do not have absolute control of my life. There are things that happen that I can't control, I can't fix. And so I have to learn to live life in a world I can't completely control. But that doesn't mean I give up, it doesn't mean I become cynical or despair, because Proverbs says that I do have some control."

You see how it works? Either Ecclesiastes without Proverbs is nonsense, or Proverbs without Ecclesiastes becomes a rip-off. So it's finding the balance and working our way across the tension between the message of Ecclesiastes and the message of Proverbs.

But there's another reality at work here. Ecclesiastes opens with the question, "What advantage can I gain with all my labor under the sun?" The writer of Ecclesiastes is saying, "How can I build a hedge around myself? What advantage can I gain by working frantically?" And the word that's translated labor means that endless, frantic frenzy of work, "by working myself to death to build protection this side of the sun."

The book of Ecclesiastes talks about life under the sun. You really don't find much about God in the book of Ecclesiastes. There are some God statements in Ecclesiastes, but what's interesting is in those God statements, after they're finished, we go right back into the pit, right back into the confusion. And I believe part of the message of Ecclesiastes is that throwing out God words, having a distant concept of God is not the answer.
Now here's something else. The book of Proverbs 1:7 says the beginning of wisdom is to fear God: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." And that statement is at the beginning of the book of Proverbs 1:7, and it's at the end of the introduction to Proverbs 9:10, just before we get into the proverbial statements.

Remember, the fear of the Lord is the first step. It's the beginning. Now we come to the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, just a few verses from the end after we've gone through all of this convoluted way of living, all these dead-ends, all these contradictions, all these starts and stops and frustrations, and I don't understand and I can't control. And we come right to the end, and the writer says, "The conclusion, when all has been heard, is fear God and keep His commandments."

I think Proverbs says, "Let's begin with the fear of the Lord and see how life works." The book of Ecclesiastes says let's look at life without God, or with this casual acquaintance with God, and see how life looks that way. And after we've lived life that way with all of its frustrations and all of its anxiety, we come to the end and we say, "You know what? I've tried it on my own. As Solomon said, ‘I had all the wealth, all this wisdom, but I tried to live life on my own, finally I concluded that the fear of the Lord is the only way that works.'" That's Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Now the third book of wisdom is the book of Job. And Job deals with a different problem. We call Job a "wisdom book" because it wrestles with this lifelong deep-seated problem of why do good and godly people suffer? Complicated question. Job's friends, Job's counselors, thought they knew why Job was suffering. It was because Job sinned.

And as you read these seemingly endless dialogues, or they aren't really dialogues, they're arguments between Job and his friends, argument after argument after argument comes up, "Job when "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel: To know wisdom and instruction, to perceive the words of understanding, to receive the instruction of wisdom, justice, judgment, and equity; to give prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion, a wise man will hear and increase learning, and a man of understanding will attain wise counsel, to understand a proverb and an enigma, the words of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction" (Proverbs 1:1-7 nkjv) are you going to admit that the reason you're suffering is because you've sinned, you've violated God?" And Job keeps defending his innocence all the way through until the end when God says to Job, "You're right, you are not suffering because you're evil. You're suffering for a much higher purpose."

Most of us somewhere, either very close to the surface or deeper in our mind, think when we suffer it's because I've done something wrong. Or even worse, when you suffer I think you must have done something wrong. I believe the whole book of Job, this long, lengthy series of debates between Job and his counselors, finally convinces us when I suffer, or when you suffer, there may very well be another explanation for suffering other than evil.

So don't be too hasty to judge yourself, don't be too hasty to judge other people. Job is a long, long book that goes carefully and systematically through the arguments that say, "If you hurt, it's because you're evil," to say, although that's universally accepted, that is not necessarily true.

Three books of wisdom, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, but they're not the only places in the Old Testament wisdom is found. If we want to live a wise life, the first decision we have to make is: God is who He says He is. I am who I say I am. And God really is smarter than I am.