Coming up in this episode, on follow-up.
What's maybe most surprising about Ecclesiastes at the end of the day is how skeptical and irreverent and boldly pessimistic it is, as a book to the point that many people have not only wondered why it's in the Bible, how did it even get there, to the point that, well, no one's ever had the curse to cut it from the Bible. Hello, my friends, welcome to another episode of Follow Him.
My name is Hank Smith. I'm your host. I'm here with my co-host, John, by the way, who does not have dry bones.
John, you probably never see that compliment before, but listen to Proverbs 1722, a
Mary Hart do a good like a medicine, but a broken spirit, dryeth the bones. Yeah, I don't want that kind of, that'd be spiritual osteoporosis or something like that. You have a Mary Hart. Oh, so do you, Hank, thank you.
“That's what makes you an excellent co-host.”
John, we are privileged to have returning to the show, Dr. Adam Miller. Adam, welcome back. We've missed you. I'm happy to be with you again as your resident, letter they sent philosopher. M.I. the only philosopher that you guys have on the show.
We do have Joe Spencer, join us every once in a while, and I know he's a close friend of yours. And it is. Both compliment each other and compliment each other really well. John, when you think of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, does anything come to mind? Yeah, the Proverbs are little soundbites, little refrigerator magnets, type of things.
It was watching the Bible Project on YouTube. I liked something they said, the Proverbs are not promises. They're kind of like, good ideas and great guidelines. They work a lot of the time, and then I loved how it said.
“So we balance those with Ecclesiastes and Joe.”
And what, oh, that's perfect.
Proverbs gave you some great ideas, train up a child in the way he should go, he will never
depart from it. Well, it's a good idea. And then we'll read Joe, but Ecclesiastes, there are some exceptions. So I appreciate that big picture. That's fantastic.
I was telling you both before we hit record. My first introduction to scripture really was the book of Proverbs, but has a special place in my heart. Adam, Dr. Miller, what are we going to do today? We've been talking about this for a few months.
You were excited to take these on. John, by the way, doesn't look like he's aged a day and decades. But you and I, Hank, I think we're looking a little rough around the edges time is taking its toll. It is.
Or lives are slipping away here. How long do we have left? Maybe days? Maybe decades? Right?
Just this morning, I was looking at my phone going, man, I got to move this further away from me. I can't. I was talking to a friend once Natalie Norton.
“You have these moments in conversation where people say something and you never forget”
it. She said she had learned that happiness in life is how you manage loss, how you deal with loss. And that's something I hadn't heard, but rang true. As Elizabeth Bishop puts it, life isn't some respects the art of losing, it's the art of losing.
Are your children grown, have your parents passed, have your dreams and ambitions been realized, the world's moving target? The one thing this guarantee is that everything that arises passes away, that's one part of the picture. Imagine that world and then couple that world in your imagination with a certain kind
of religion. Imagine, for instance, a religion that required you to lose your life in order to save it. Imagine a religion that could, at any time, ask you, like Jesus did, to leave your family, or to willingly suffer persecution, or to plain go sell all that you have right now, and
give it to the poor. Imagine a religion that is explicitly bremised on the necessity of sacrificing all things. Because as the lectures on faith put it, any religion that does not require the sacrifice
of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary on to life in salvation.
Imagine a religion here that required you to willingly return to God, everything you'd ever been given to concentrate all of your time, all of your talents, all of your possessions,
Turning over the whole of your life to God's care and attention.
Can you imagine that kind of religion coupled with this kind of world?
Can you imagine joining this kind of religion on purpose and then showing up there be Sunday
“for decades, then perhaps even attempting in all earnestness to actually and honestly sacrifice”
all things, consecrating them all back to God. So imagine on the one hand then that we have a world where disappointment and loss and death that are guaranteed and on the other hand, a religion, where a sacrifice and consecration, not just of some things but of all things, is quite intentionally the explicit order of the day.
The place where these two lines meet, the place where an evitable loss crosses with willing sacrifice, that's the place where wisdom arises. This is what the book of Proverbs and the book of Ecclesiastes are about. Wisdom, both are wisdom books. Both books are integral to an ongoing and open and biblical conversation that is unfinished,
that you and I are invited to participate in about the nature of this divine wisdom. Both books then I think pressed the same set of questions, what kind of world is this,
“what kind of life is vain and foolish given that world and then what kind of life would”
be redemptive and wise given that world? With the time we have today I want to try to accomplish three things.
First I want to look at how the book of Proverbs describes wisdom in terms of a willingness
to fear God, welcome correction and break free from the kind of self-disception that keeps us from seeing the truth about ourselves and the world. Second I want to look at how the book of Ecclesiastes can function as a harsh, perhaps very harsh, but necessary medicine that forces us to see you with clear eyes, the nature of the problem we keep avoiding, a problem that perhaps the whole of our contemporary
world is built to distract us from seeing? Third I want to then look at how this kind of wisdom can, by way of faith, open onto the kind of surprising, redemptive and unconventional wisdom that Jesus describes as loving your enemy, or what the Apostle Paul calls the foolishness of God.
As Paul puts it in first Corinthians, the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness,
but unto us which are Satan, it is the power of God. God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. Such that at the end of the day is conventional as the kind of wisdom we find and Proverbs seems to be the kind of wisdom that stay in the gospel of Jesus Christ is pretty unconventional.
If Proverbs depends on the expectation of a sort of symmetry between action and consequence, the gospel hinges instead on a asymmetrical and unconditional expression of perfect love, so that true wisdom divine wisdom looks for all the world to the world like foolishness. So the question is why, why would real wisdom look foolish and why would that foolishness be reductive?
Fantastic. Before we go any further, John, for those who haven't been here before, or maybe this
“is their first introduction to Adam, what do we know about him?”
Adam is a professor of philosophy at Colin College in McKinney, Texas. He has a bachelor's in comparative literature from Brigham Young University and a master's in a PhD in philosophy from Villanova University. He's the author of probably more than a dozen books. I'm looking at original grace right here, and I know that one that's currently in production
that he wrote with Rosalind Welch, whom we've had on the podcast, called Seven Songs "Science of Christ in the Old Testament." Everybody that loves the Old Testament should be interested in that, especially as we talked about songs in the Old Testament, which we have this year. That's going to be a great contribution.
Thank you for joining us again. My pleasure. Let's read from the Come Follow Me Manual, and then Adam, we're excited. John and I both, to listen and learn. It starts this way.
You might think of the book of Proverbs as a collection of wise counsel from loving parents.
It's main message is that if you seek wisdom, especially God's wisdom, life w...
but Proverbs is followed by the book of Ecclesiastes, which seems to say,
it's not that simple. The preacher quoted in Ecclesiastes observed that he gave his heart to know wisdom, but still found vexation of Spirit and much grief. In various ways, the book asks, "Can there be real meaning in a world where everything seems vain, temporary, and uncertain?"
Yet while the two books look at life from different perspectives, they teach similar truths. Ecclesiastes declares, "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter.
Fear God and keep His commandments for this is the whole duty of man."
This is the same principle found throughout Proverbs, trust in the Lord with all thine heart.
“Life is always better if not always perfect when we trust and follow the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Beautiful, so well written. Adam, with that, where do you want to start? How do you want to go about this? Yeah, that is. We'll start with your standard issue disclaimer here for listeners. Not a historian. Let alone of the Hebrew Bible or a scholar of ancient, Semitic languages. I'm a philosopher. Sometimes, we're the also the hat of theologian.
That's a different kind of job that brings a different perspective to these passages. The historian might ask a question like, "Did this event really happen or why did this event really happen?" Where a philosopher would instead ask a question like, "What does it even mean for a thing to be real anyway?" Which is a very weird, very hard sort of question. Weird, hard questions about obvious things that we normally take for granted.
That's the philosopher's job. We'll try to do some of that today. Let's just start with a little bit of really big picture of biblical context. As has probably been emphasized by many of your guests here this year, the Bible and the Old Testament in particular is not a single book. The Bible is a collection of books. The word Bible literally means books plural, not book singular.
“That's good. I think these books, they need each other. They are in open conversation”
with each other. To understand these books is not just to understand what's being said on any given page, but to see how that page is in active conversation with a number of other very different pages that may address the same topic from very different perspectives. Though they share the same God and are inspired by the same spirit, these books come from many different times in places and perspectives, and most of those are very different from ours.
Very different from the world in which you and I live, very different from the sort of assumptions that you and I might bring to bear about the world or about religion. I think a good general interpretive rule for the Bible in general and the Old Testament in particular in Scripture even more broadly is to keep the parts in circulation with each other, to keep them all in conversation with each other, and especially to keep all of the parts of the Bible and all
of the parts of our Scriptures in conversation with Jesus Christ. If we fall into the trap of expecting anyone verse or anyone chapter or anyone book to be telling us exactly what we need to
“know and that's it and that's all there is, then I think we'll miss the point. The point is the way”
that God has initiated a conversation with us, as human beings, that this conversation has been recorded in part for us in our Scriptures, that the conversation is open, ongoing, and invites us to
participate in an active way in that conversation with all of it always circling back to Jesus Christ.
If we fall, that is a kind of general rule, then most of the concerns that we tend to have about any given passage of Scripture can find their proper place and we can find a way to see what is being offered in that Scripture even if it's not what we expected or even needed at that moment. It's not univocal. It's almost like a choir. All these different authors offer something different each. Sometimes they come in direct conflict with each other and that's okay.
I like an open and ongoing conversation. I love that we're going through a book of Scripture every year. Hank haven't you been pleasantly delighted with how a different guest will see the same segment we
Did for you sick?
stuff. I don't know nothing. And as we start doing this, it's been really fun to see how much
there is to learn every time. Talking about dealing with loss, the loss of confidence in your own
“knowledge. When you're young, you think you know everything and by the end, do you think I know nothing?”
As the book of Proverbs emphasizes, that's a big part of what divine wisdom looks like, knowing how little you know, not trusting what you thought you knew and is then putting all of your trusting God. What's the book of Mormon verse that says we have to consider ourselves fools before God? Yeah, we are. A little bit about the foolishness of God. Yeah, the foolishness of God to become fools with Christ and for Christ.
Do you ever wonder when the Lord sees us all in these conversations if he's up there going like this? How far we're missing the point or whatever. We think we're really getting into it and the Lord's going, oh boy. It seems to me when I am sitting with someone like Adam and entering scripture, I'm less sure of everything. I know there's a healthy feeling to it. I know it doesn't sound like it's a good thing to be less sure of everything you know. I think it means you're more
“open to learning, which is God to be a good thing. Yeah, I think it's crucial to the learning,”
experience, it's crucial to finding yourself at that moment where at the limit of what you know,
you put your trust in something that's not you. You put your trust in God and let him carry the weight. I love it. Two other generals points I think about reading scripture and interpretive point. I think it's also very helpful to keep in mind that genre, understanding genre can be especially important to knowing and following what's going on and any of these particular books in the Old Testament. And genre can be especially important for understanding books like
Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which are doing a different kind of thing than most of what the rest of the Bible is doing right. Different genres have different kinds of rules and different kinds of goals and use different sorts of rhetoric than other genres do. And this respect as we already mentioned, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes are examples of wisdom books rather than being narrative or history, or law or prophecy, like most of the rest of what we have gotten or we'll get here in our
course of Old Testament study this year. There's something more like an inspired set of parallel reflections on the meaning of life and law and prophecy. It's as if in the middle of the Old Testament, someone called Timeout from this study stream of story and prophecy to say, let's sit for a moment with this. Depending on how we count, there are four wisdom books in the Bible. Sometimes the
“songs are included in that list, but I think really the songs are a whole separate thing to”
themselves. The four wisdom books, as I would count them include Proverbs here, Ecclesiastes, Joe and the song of the Solomon, sometimes called the song of songs. Proverbs is John has already noted, is not a surprising inclusion in the Bible. Primarily consists of pretty conventional wisdom about what you would need to do in order to negotiate your way through the world in a more or less successful way, fingers crossed. It's a pretty straightforwardly pious and optimistic book. So I don't think
it's any surprise that we have Proverbs in there. And as you noted Hank, it's a powerful book
and can be a great entry point to our experience of a Hebrew way of thinking about the world. But the other three here and our list, Ecclesiastes, Joe and the song of songs are all quite surprising, all very surprising in terms of the kinds of things that they have to say, and maybe even just in terms of the fact that they're in the Bible at all. As we take a close look at the details of Ecclesiastes, today, one of the first questions we might end up asking ourselves is, how and why is this in the Bible?
Ecclesiastes. One of these things is not like the others.
Yes, exactly.
the rest of the Bible, and especially keep them in conversation with Jesus Christ, these are also some of the most rewarding and valuable books in the Bible precisely because of how surprising and unusual they are. And because of the ways that they as a result can challenge us to think harder, to think more deeply, to connect more truly with the gospel message itself. Unjove as you recall, you get kind of an extended argument about the nature of divine justice
and the relationship between justice and human suffering and spoiler alert. It turns out that the relationship between justice and suffering is not at all what we thought and that recognizing this can open on to a direct experience of God, which in some ways is pretty surprising conclusion to reach, though perhaps not in relationship to the teachings of Jesus Christ.
“What's this surprising conclusion though in the canon of the Old Testament?”
The song of Solomon is a surprising inclusion because as short as it is, it's a powerful
two thousand year old love poem that not only treats human intimacy as a divine gift, but that has long been understood as an allegory for developing a deep and intimate connection with God. The third of those is Ecclesiastes, the third of the surprising inclusion series in the wisdom books. Ecclesiastes may be the most surprising of all of these three wisdom books and may be the most challenging of all three of those surprising wisdom books and may be one of my favorite books
of scripture period. I even at one point once published a small little bespoke paraphrase of the whole book and contemporary English to try to capture for people. What's so valuable about it
“and why they might care about the experience of reading Ecclesiastes. It's a weird hard book”
that refuses to take for granted many of the conventional ideas that we typically assume are obvious, that the book of progress itself may take for granted as obvious. You can see then why as a result that might appeal especially to a philosopher. If our business as philosophers is to not take for granted as obvious, the things that seem obvious to everybody else. Well, Ecclesiastes does a great job. I don't do anxious that. The Lord wanted to put in something for philosophers, right? We can't
have the missing out here. He throws us the occasional bone. Yeah. I will say this before we go any further. To everyone listening, you're already loving Adam has to say go back four years ago, walk through the book of Job with us. Go find that episode. I remember being so unsatisfied with the ending,
because Adam showed us, Job never gets his questions answered. Right? The Lord comes with something
but not answers to questions and then the book ends and you feel like, no, where's the wrap-up, where's the part where all of the questions get answered? And it didn't happen. That left me
“kind of uncomfortable, but also, again, I think it's a healthy uncomfortable. Yeah, Joe spends”
forty chapters. He and his friends asking these questions about suffering and justice and Job just begging God to show up and answer his questions. Then to everyone's surprise at the end of the book of Job, God does show up. But instead of answering any of Job's questions, he spends four chapters of his own asking Job question after question. And then he wraps the whole thing up. God does by saying, and Job was right to ask his questions. You friends who told him to
sit down and be quiet. You were wrong. Job was right to ask them, even though God only responds
with questions of his own and never answers. It's a cheerlear mark of all thing, the book of Job.
You can easily find that on our YouTube channel. Go back and find Adam. John, you know how I feel about Adam. You feel the same way. It's always a profound experience. Yeah, if it's mind expanding, it's so expanding and I just think it puts us in a position hopefully for some inspiration to be hungry and to be wondering, you love it. Be open to analyzing why you are certain or maybe should you be so certain about things.
I appreciate that. Adam and his friend Joe Spencer, who we've had on the show,
Have helped me appreciate philosophy in ways I never thought possible or even...
open me up to a world of thinking that I didn't even know existed.
“This John noted to be hungry and to be wondering is a good place to be spiritually.”
I mean, at one last thing here in terms of setting up or reading of the pair of them, what's maybe most surprising about Ecclesiastes at the end of the day is how skeptical and irreverent and oddly pessimistic it is as a book to the point that many people have not only wondered why it's in the Bible, how did it even get there to the point that well, no one's ever had the courage to cut it from the Bible.
Later ending to the book was added to help soften the blow of its claims by editors who were concerned. After unsuspecting readers simply stumbling upon it, here's the kind of unsurprising and relatively conventional thing that you would find in the book of Proverbs. This is, for example, Proverbs chapter 3, verse 33. The Lord's curse is on the household of the wicked, but he blesses the home of the righteous. No surprises here, exactly what you might expect to have been said,
the wicked will be cursed and the righteous will be blessed, or something like this, and Proverbs 15, 17 is a great one. Better a meal of vegetables, where there is love,
“than a fattened ox, where there is hatred. This also just good sound, I think conventional,”
wisdom, you're better off just with the salad, where everyone's happy than a meal, a rich feast, where everybody's angry and upset. Good plain unsurprising proverbial advice. Here on the other hand are the alarming lines that you find in Ecclesiastes. Here, for example, is the opening line of Ecclesiastes. Verse 2, I'll use a variety of translations here as we skip around back and forth, depending on what's most useful. This is from the New English Translation.
"Futile, futile" laments the teacher. "Absolutely futile, everything is futile." That's the opening line. The opening line of Ecclesiastes. Use that in a talk. Put that on your missionary plaque. Yes, this is getting used all the time. I'm sure by Ecclesiastes and different sorts of Facebook memes, etc. So a promote interest, or here is the original closing verse of Ecclesiastes.
Twelve chapters later, this is verse 8 of chapter 12. This is the NIV version. Meaningless meaningless says the teacher. Everything is meaningless. That's the closing line of the book. The opening line of the book, futile, futile, everything is futile. The closing line of the book. Meaningless meaningless, everything is meaningless. And unusual position for the book to take.
“The million dollar question then again, there was, "Why? Why does Ecclesiastes say this?”
What does it have to do with Proverbs? And what happens when we put this cry of despair from Ecclesiastes in conversation with the teachings of Jesus Christ?" The original ending of Ecclesiastes is pretty clearly chapter 12 verse 8. Even in contemporary translations, the theme is obvious, because the discourse switches from
first person to third person, all the way through the book, the preacher, quote unquote,
the speaker, has been speaking in the first person directly to us. And it switches to the third person here and verses 9 through 12. And you get a little commentary on what people have just read. That also gives it a kind of a slight more pious less skeptical in irreverent spin. And it wraps up by saying, "Since every deed will God bring to judgment for every hidden act, be it good, or evil, at the end of the day, fear God and do good." Which is a pretty pious ending
to a, a resolutely impious, at least rather conventional perspective and skeptical book.
It reminds me of the book of Mark, which ends with, you never see the resurrected Lord.
It's the women saw the angels and ran away and someone did not like that ending.
They had it quite a bit.
It says, "They went out from the supplicer. They were afraid. They didn't say anything to anyone.
And that's the original ending. That's the end. It's somewhat uncomfortable with that."
“The theme is empty, yeah. We can be sympathetic. I think with people being uncomfortable”
ending just with an empty tomb, but it's also a kind of extraordinary move on the part of the earliest manuscripts that we have, at least for the gospel of Mark, that it has the courage and audacity to leave their gospel ending with a kind of question for us to answer, then, as believers or not, in response to the fact that the tomb was empty. The basic problem has to do here with the way that there's something really obvious about the world that in general, you and I can't see
or don't see or don't want to see or even refuse to see and that this is what prevents us
from being wise. Such that the first step toward redemption is to open our eyes and willingly see
what it is that we have not wanted to see. As the book of Proverbs says, "We end up living as fools or doops or is a Robert altar puts it "dults." It says translation. Because of this endurance, then we do end up doing foolish and destructive things. We end up pursuing happiness in possible ways that fail to match up with how the world really is and with what God really wants for us. We have to see with clear eyes the world as it actually is. That's sort of sober
wisdom I think is what Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were both meant to help equip us. I have to be just abused of the idea that my happiness depends on getting something and response to my own desires so that I can discover instead that my happiness depends really on knowing something or even better someone. That someone is God. What I have to know is what Jesus sees and knows. That the world is full of loss and suffering as everyone dies and all things pass away. This is what
Jesus sees more clearly than anyone else. Jesus never hides. He never turns his face from fear or loss or
pain or suffering. He always looks at square in the eye. He sees it as clearly as it can possibly be seen. But then I also have to do what then Jesus does. I have to greet all this inevitable loss of all things with my own willing sacrifice and consecration of all things. And this is Jesus shows his ironically the only way to save and redeem all things is by reading their loss with willing sacrifice. And this sacrifice is a kind of transformative alchemy that gives us back
everything that we would lose as we love and care for it even as it passes away. Jesus is the model there at the end of the day. Though I think Mormon gives us a look at it in
“miniature. But that's what the sake I think in both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.”
I'm still thinking about that I myself am adult and we all are. There's a really helpful phrase for me in King Benjamin says I'm in Mosaic III 11 that his blood atoneth for the sins of those who have fallen by the transgression of Adam who have died not knowing the will of God concerning them or who have ignorantly sinned. I just think there's hope for adults because a lot of us have ignorantly sinned. That gives me some hope that yeah
or were a lot of adults and I've had my moments of great voltage myself. Adam I have two items I would love for you to comment on. One you brought up Mormon in the Book of Mormon to me one facet of many of my testimony the Book of Mormon is it's wisdom and
“it seems that you have to live a while to get that kind of wisdom. You just have to be on the earth”
observing for quite a while and here you have this young 20s farmer Lehigh has wisdom of an older person. Mormon has the wisdom of you even watch Mormon change throughout the book. You can watch him soften ten years old as he writes. I would love to ask you about the wisdom
You've seen in the Book of Mormon.
Mormon like the Bible. There's a good example of what it looks like to see an unfolding on going
“growing conversation about what it looks like to experience the kind of wisdom that allows for”
redemption. You can see the way that that conversation unfolds in individual people's lives. As you noted in the Book of Mormon you can see the way that Nephi undergoes a whole series of transformations that deepen and expand what he understands about God and about God's work. You can see the way that it unfolds over the span of the whole Book of Mormon. The way that the Book of Mormon embodies a whole series of perspectives on wisdom
that are irreducible to one point of view. But that in conversation with one another all help
point toward and deepen our understanding of Jesus Christ. Adam I'm going to save my second
question for a little bit later. It's a little bit of a teaser. It'll keep you here. Because what we've been talking about is kind of spelled out in the Book of Proverbs. Here's Proverbs 8/11 for wisdom is better than rubies. There's a bit of an add-a-miller feel to that
“to that verse. Yeah wisdom is better than rubies. Then I think as a version of something that”
I've floated a few minutes ago that at the end of the day happiness does not depend on getting something but it depends instead on knowing something. It depends on acquiring a certain sort of wisdom that understands the nature of the world, the your place and what all that has to do then with your relationship to God. The comparison to rubies is helpful here. It's a kind of comparison that the Book of Proverbs frequently makes because it wants to emphasize how then valuable
wisdom is and how much more valuable wisdom is than the kinds of things that we normally spend our time trying to acquire. This take a closer look now at the Book of Proverbs and then it's some of the details of the Book of Ecclesiastes, both of which I think are well worth
“our time. The Book of Proverbs is itself a collection of sayings compiled over several centuries”
from a variety of different sources. The Book of Proverbs doesn't hide this. The seams are visible and it indicates to you when it's transitioning from one set of sayings to another set of sayings. Some of the sayings compiled in Proverbs are attributed directly to King Solomon himself and may go back even that far to the 10th century. Some of them we are told were compiled in the time of King Hezekiah in the 8th century but other sections are also clearly borrowed from even
non Hebrew sources and repurposed. Some are explicitly ascribed to sources other than Solomon.
Eight basic sections to the Book. You get a little introduction and the first couple of verses
of chapter one. Then from the remainder of chapter one through chapter nine you get an extended discourse on wisdom on the nature of wisdom that's primarily framed as the conversation between a father and a son. Like most conversations between fathers and sons is a monologue. But by the father to the son. It's very different than the rest of the Book of Proverbs because it's one long sustained more or less continuous conversation. Most of the rest of the Book of Proverbs
consists of little teeny tiny two-line couplets. Very pithy sayings that you could essentially read in any order and are more or less self-contained in their own right. Most of the rest of the Book of Proverbs you could cut up with a pair of scissors versus fibers. Put them into a lottery ball hopper, spin them around and pull them out in any order and need to be just fine. Nothing
would be lost in the process. But those first nine chapters are not like that. It's that opening
section on the nature of divine wisdom you will be surprised to learn is what interests me most. We are shocked. The practical advice that you get in the middle people are welcome to spend time with that but that's not what I'm going to focus on. One of the most striking features of those opening nine chapters especially is the way that at various points wisdom is personified as a woman, wisdom as a woman speaks directly to the son, to the father's son petitioning herself
For the son to care about the nature of wisdom.
of Hebrew literature for an abstraction like wisdom to be personified in this way. Not unusual
“maybe for wisdom to be associated with the feminine qualities but unusual for abstractions in general”
to be personified in Hebrew thinking. But this carries through in general across the biblical can and the idea the divine wisdom is almost a kind of quasi-personage. She has been involved with God's work from the very beginning and has expressed God's will throughout the course of time. It's passages like this that also supply a template for what John does at the beginning of his gospel when John says in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word
was God. That kind of personification of the word, of logos, of reason, of wisdom. They're associated with Jesus Christ. We find it early template for that way of talking here in the book of Proverbs. In the book Mormon this is Mosiah 820. Oh, how marvelous are the works of the Lord? How long does he suffer with this people? Yay and how blind and impenetrable are the understandings of the children of men for they will not seek wisdom neither do they desire that she
should rule over them. Book Mormon 2 has wisdom as a she. You'd see my wife nodding at this part.
Adam, you're right. She speaks first person. Right in chapter 1, she cry if in the chief place
of concourse in the openings of her gates in the city she uttereth her words, saying how long he simple ones will you love simplicity? He's simple ones, he's simple ones. How long will you doalt hang on to your ignorance? Our appetite for wisdom will depend on our appetite for correction. Are we willing to be corrected? Corrected. We will only be as wise as we are willing to be corrected. We will only acquire as much wisdom as we are willing to bear what seems
to outsiders to be what is fearful. The fear of the Lord. And especially you're going to use for this
“section some of Robert Alters translations, which I think are some of the cleanest, clearest,”
most contemporary translations. Here's Robert chapter 1, verses 1 through 7. The Proverbs of Solomon, Son of David, King of Israel, to know wisdom and reproof, to understand discerning maxims, to accept the reproof of insight, righteousness, justice, and uprightness, to give shrewdness to the simple, to a lad, knowledge and cunning, but the wise man here and gain learning and the discerning acquired designs, to understand Proverbs and adages the words
of the wise and their riddles. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, wisdom and reproof, bolts, despise. This is the official prologue here, essentially, to the rest of the book of Proverbs. What's less clear in the King James version that is really emphasized here in Alters version is the role of reproof and correction. For instance, in King James' verse 2 gets translated as to know wisdom and instruction to perceive the words of understanding. Instruction is fine as a
translation, but it's a pretty weak translation of instruction in the sense of you're going to now
“be instructed about what you need to change, about how you need to be corrected. Reproof is straightforwardly”
how altered translates that, to know wisdom and reproof those two things go together, to accept the reproof of insight. That's what's at stake here in knowledge. Will I accept the reproof or will I reject it? To borrow another famous line from the book of Mormon, with respect to the nature of wisdom, the wicked take the truth to be hard. This is a good sign of the fact that something might be true, that I take it to be hard, that I don't want to hear it, but I would prefer
it not to be the case, that I reject it and refuse it. That's a good sign that I might pause and reconsider and that there's something quite important. In fact, it might be a stake here instead. Wisdom and
reproof both despise. Part of what's always going to be at stake here in what was the mistrying
to show us is that wisdom is trying to show us that our desires are not a good measure for truth.
It's going to hurt to discover that I'm probably not going to get what I thou...
I'm not going to want to hear it. Seeing the truth is always going to involve my willingness to
“lay down my will and accept reality and endorse the Lord's will instead and that always pinches.”
It always hurts that sort of correction. The fear of the Lord then is the beginning of wisdom as Proverbs puts it here. These verses later in chapter 1 that you already pointed us toward Hank of verses 2325 and then 29. Read like this. Wisdom personified. Wisdom cries out in the streets in the squares. She lifts her voice at the bustling crossroads. She calls at the entrance to the gate says her sayings, "How long doops will you love being dupt?" That's great. I really like
others translation here. How long doops will you love being dupt? In scoffers, lust, scoffing,
in fools, hate, knowledge. Turn back to my review. Look, I would pour out my spirit to you. I would
“make my words known with you because I called and you resisted. I reached out my hand and”
unpaid heat and you flung aside all my counsel and you did not want my review because they hated knowledge and the Lord's fear they did not choose. How long doops will you love being dupt? There's a certain sort of innocence to our ignorance given the way that as a human being your born as a baby, you don't know things everybody needs time and space to learn and grow when you arrive you're
a blank slate. There's no shame in that. But over time here, especially as we grow attached
to trying to understand reality in terms of our own desires, an element of self-deception becomes involved here where we become culpable in a way for our attachment to this distorted way of seeing reality that refuses to recognize the really obvious truths about how the world is passing away, about how it won't line up with our desires and about how we're called as a result to sacrifice instead of cling to all the things that we've been given such that as dupts, we end up loving being
dupt. The more successful we can be in our self-deception that no, we really are great and we really do deserve it and we really are going to get what we want, the better we can preserve that fantasy, the more we like it, and the more resistant we become to the truth that wisdom is in fact
“offering instead, the hard truth that we need to hear. That's why Ecclesiastes is going to hit me so”
hard and do everything you're chasing is meaningless and futile. I don't want to hear that. Yeah, zero punches pulled once we get to Ecclesiastes. Proverbs does the nice job of setting up the pins for us here in many respects. A lot of the contemporary world is quite intentionally built to reinforce in Caudel or tendency toward distraction and self-deception and avoidance, to not see the real problems, to actually respond to them with care and love that
they require. I noticed that Wisdom said, she asks, "How long Ecclesiastes will you love being dupt? Not how long dupts will you be dupt, but you actually will enjoy it?" You love this part. Yeah, we love it. I often joke with my students that it used to be the case that when I was in school and I found myself in a classroom where I didn't want to be, that I would have to myself do all the hard work of fantasizing that I was someplace else doing something else with someone else.
I would pony up and do the hard work of being dupt in a way that I loved to be dupt by my own fantasies and daydreams. For them, that's a pretty rare experience actually for my students today that if they're in a classroom wishing that they were somewhere else doing something else, that they don't have to do that work themselves. They can offload all that work of fantasizing and being distracted and running away from how things actually are and where they're actually
at by flicking up in their phones and letting the world bear the burden of helping them to love being dupts who love being dupt. It's so easy. I don't have to daydream anymore. My daydreams are right on my screen. It will take me somewhere else mentally. Yeah, we'll pay good money to have someone else dupt us more effectively than we could do ourselves because we love being
Dupt so much.
I've heard that before, yes. Yeah. Yeah, not how long will you be dupt, telling what you love being dupt? The scoffer's left scoffing, he says, "Full's hate knowledge.
“I called and you resisted." Maybe that's why it's difficult to compete with media and phones as a”
teacher, as a parent sometimes, even as myself. I'd rather be doing something else somewhere else with someone else. I'm going to rescue that king who's in a tunnel full of boulders. Better go jump these trains. Yeah, no. How interesting. I liked that. I didn't ever thought of it that way, but yeah, I want to be somewhere else doing something else. We'll see this again and again, but in the social media, the truth loses to desire every time.
What we wish for the case, what we wanted to be true, what rings our bells and colludes with our fantasies, that will win out every time over what we don't want to hear and don't want to see and what is actually the case. The algorithm wants it to be that way, because you'll come back.
“Well, this is the price, then, of real wisdom. You have to hear and see and feel what you”
didn't want to hear and see and feel. You have to be like Mormon of sober mind and quick to observe the way things actually are and how it departs from what you thought you wanted things to be. John wears in the book of Mormon, the spirit will show things as they really are. There might be an addition there and it will be really uncomfortable. Jacob 413, I think, and you won't like it. Yeah, you probably won't love it.
I'd love what you've taught me here. When I see the word instruction in King James, I've always thought,
I'm just learning something, but this kind of instruction is this is what you're doing wrong. This is reproof. This is what you thought you knew, but isn't right. That's humbling and helpful, though.
“I know willing to receive instruction or reproof for my duplication.”
Yep, that's the price of wisdom. That's the door through which we must be willing to enter. Once you pass through that door and see the truth, that the world is passing away and you will lose everything, then you will be called to actually sacrifice willingly everything in order to say that and care for it in Vredeema, which is also a hard thing that we are keen to avoid and keen to avoid. Here in chapter 3, we get very famous and rightly so set of verses and
five through twelve. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your discernment. Through all your ways know Him and He will make your path straight, do not be wise in your own eyes, fear the Lord and swore of from evil. Let it be healing for your flesh and a balm to your bones, or as we get it in the King James, even better here. It shall be health to thy naval,
and marrow to thy bones. Honor the Lord more than your wealth, then the first fruits of your crop
and your barns will be filled with abundance. Your vats will burst with new wine. The Lord's reproofed my son, do not spurn and do not despise his review. Adam, in chapter 3 verse 8, it shall be health to thy naval is, that's a pronoun there. It. Is it wisdom? The trust, to be not wise and not know nice, fear the Lord, depart from evil. It shall be health to thy naval. That this behavior will be, and that's a good question. Yeah, that's a good question.
My inclination is to see the whole of verses five through seven as the it, this whole complex of trusting in the Lord, not leaning to your own understanding, being not wise in your own eyes and fearing the Lord. Those things collectively are what constitute wisdom. That wisdom then will
be health to your naval and marrow to your bones. It's a powerful phrase. Health to your naval,
your naval is your belly button. It's the place where in the womb strength and nourishment, as the place where it comes from, where it flows into you, health here to the naval, strength and power and growth coming to you from God and marrow to your bones and powerful image. Let it be healing for your flesh and a balm to your bones. This is how altar has it.
One of my favorite verses here in all of Proverbs in chapter 4, verse seven,
oh, I love it. Here I really prefer the King James translation, but I'll give you altar first.
“Altars translation of chapter 4, verse seven goes like this. The beginning of wisdom is”
get wisdom. That's good. The beginning of wisdom is get wisdom and in all that you get discernment. I suspect the Hebrew here might even be pithier and more or entertaining than the English translation. The King James goes like this. Wisdom is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom and then this my favorite. And with all that getting, get understanding. With all that getting, get understanding. So the two ways to understand this, I think you might
see it as urging us to always and only get wisdom. With all of your getting, the thing that you
should be getting is wisdom. But also I think you could read it in the sense that as altar seems to suggest that in all that you get also get discernment, such that whatever you're doing,
“whatever you're trying to get, whatever work is at hand, you should also simultaneously be acquiring”
wisdom. You should be getting discernment. Your understanding should be increasing, regardless of whatever the particular task is that you are engaged in at the moment. Wisdom should simultaneously be accruing. With all of your getting, get understanding. Keep your eyes wide
open the whole time. Always be quick to observe. Always be sober. Never be duped by your love
for being duped. It's nice. The beginning of wisdom, get wisdom. I seem so simple when you put it like that. Just a handful more here in this same spirit versus 18 and 19 in chapter four. But the path of the righteous is like light's radiance. Ever brighter till day has come. The way of the wicked is like darkness. They know not on what they stumble. Whereas the king James has it, the path of the just is as the shining light that shineeth more and more until the perfect day.
The way of the wicked is as darkness. They know not at what they stumble. That's a good example
too of the real value of also always simultaneously keeping an eye on the king James. Translation.
The way that it might have been cleaner and clearer with the Hebrew was saying in the contemporary translation. But if you skip the king James altogether, then you miss the way that we're getting biblical language that is picked up in repurposed elsewhere all the time. In other passages of Scripture, in songs, etc. This notion of the path of the just being a shineer light that shines more and more brightly unto the perfect day. That's language that
has resonance across the whole of Scripture and into our contemporary way of speaking as later they say to you. You'll miss that if you skip out on the king James altogether. Even if it's also really valuable to read contemporary translations. The path of the just is that the commandment
“is that living with integrity, the path of the just is maybe the beginning of wisdom. That's why”
maybe the Lord has given us commandments is to get you started down that road and give you a gleam of light. Yeah, and I think it has to do here with the way that this sort of wisdom is not a theoretical endeavor. It's something that accrues as you engage practically in obedience in the service, in sacrifice, and as you serve in obeying sacrifice more, the wisdom will increase in parallel. But it's the kind of wisdom that you can only have at the end of the day by having
done what you are asked to do. You can't have it in the abstract. You can only get it from the inside out by experiencing it for yourself. That unfolds and this very gradual, very careful way over time. Accrues with engagement, I really like that. But the way of the wicked is darkness. Instead, one characteristic feature of wickedness is the way that you will constantly stumble because the world will not be what you want it to be, but also you won't understand why you're
stumbling because you don't actually grasp the true nature of reality. You've refused to see it. So you keep stubbing your toes and you keep getting frustrated and disappointed by how things turn
Out when you try to force them to be what you want.
correction that would allow wisdom to actually arise so that you could see the sacrifices that
need to be made in order for love and justice and mercy to prevail. It would seem, this is of course how you would think about it automatically as a kid. It would seem like the way to care for your own soul would be to privilege your own desires to try to get those
“desires satisfied. But that's not actually the case. What you have to do instead, it turns out”
as Jesus puts it right, if you want to save your soul, you can't save your soul. You can't save your soul by saving your soul. You have to lose it to save it and you have to be willing to accept
to the sort of instruction that brings your heart and mind back around to reality in order to
avoid despising your own soul here. I love the idea of in a human way to have mentors who are willing to give you correction. Some of my last advice I got from my mission president was to go home and find mentors to be willing to say, "Do I have any blind spots? Am I doing anything wrong that you see that hurting me? Do we only take invite, reproof how I, which was terrific advice?" Yeah, mentors are really important in that respect. This is not the kind of thing you can outsource
to an app or a chatbot whose entire orientation is to flatter you and agree with you and aid in a bet all of your fantasies and your desire to be doomed because that's good business drives engagement as they say. Captures are attention. When what you really need are people who because they
“love you will tell you what you need to hear even or especially if you don't want to hear it.”
The gospel is a kind of apprentice ship model where we have to sign up to work with people who aren't far enough along that they know what they're doing so that they can show us how to do what they've been doing so that we then can discover it for ourselves and show it to others in turn. But you have to do it. I've heard Hank quote verse 13 dozens of times, "A merry heart, make it the cheerful count and it's very similar to what I quoted. A merry heart do with good
like a medicine." Maybe I like it because it's one thing that comes natural to me. It's a merry heart. Well, who else did it come natural to? We all need some what do we call it? Vitamin NCT, Joseph Smith said he had a native cheery temperament. That's a super valuable thing and it points out the way that our happiness here does not depend on getting something. It depends on a certain state of mind. It depends on understanding something, seeing something. It depends on the native cheery
temperament, the disposition of our hearts. That's where the truth of our happiness lies.
And that's a very powerful liberating thing to discover that I don't have to depend on the
world to give me what I want in order to find joy. But that I can bring to the world by sacrificing for it, caring for it, appreciating it, being grateful for it. That's the source of joy is what I bring to it rather than what I had hoped to get from. I'm trying to put this in a way I might understand it better. Almost like he that refuses to eat healthy and exercise doesn't really like his own body, even though that's not what the body wants, seemingly. When I get up early to exercise,
my body doesn't seem to want it yet. I'm doing it because I want to care for my body. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. So it does seem like the opposite. If I love my own body, just give it what it wants. Something it doesn't want. Twinkies, ding-dong.
“Yeah, but there's a place for ding-dongs, especially, I think.”
It almost seems like the last thing my body wants, but it's supposedly the one thing it needs. Yeah, exercise is a good example of how the body acquires wisdom. Where you will haul it out of bed and you force your body to engage with reality in an intensive way that doesn't match up neatly or obviously with your own desires. But that in the process, you then discover things about the nature of reality and about your own nature, about who and what
you are that you couldn't have discovered otherwise. You start to understand what your body is. You start to discover what your body can or cannot do. You start to discover what strengths you do or don't have. But if you don't leave desire to the side to engage with reality in this intensive
Way that exercise requires, then you don't get to see the sunrise, you don't ...
blood pumping in your own veins, and you don't discover who and what you are either.
“The thing about reality, as I think proverbs emphasizes, is that if you get a taste for it,”
you will love it and sacrifice everything, caring, to take care of it, to redeem it, to save it. That's Jesus. Jesus sees the whole of it, and it just makes him love it and care for it all the more.
Feels like a paradox at first. Yeah, it certainly does. There's a Disney film.
Do you write to remember when the Disney film cars came out and the older cars trying to teach the younger car, you've got to turn left to go right. Yeah, you crazy. It makes no sense. Well, and you might look at the look, Alma's advice to Shibwan.
“You have to bridele your passions, and then you'll be filled with love. It's like, wait, why?”
Should night let it go? Yeah. Let's give you one more passage here. Just for fun from
proverbs, and then we'll turn left to go right by looking at the enthusiastic. That's a good way to describe the enthusiastic. It feels like you're taking a hard left when you hope to go right, but then you end up in the right place at the end of the day. Chapter 16, verse 31, gray hair is a crown of splendor through righteousness obtained, or is the new English translation as a gray hair is like a crown of glory and is attained in
the path of righteousness. When you started this atom, you said, if we're lucky,
“we can throw a gold in gray. For lucky will have gray hair. Exactly. You have to cross your”
fingers and hope that you will stick around long enough to get that crown of glory. As we complain about getting old, not realizing what a blessing it is. This is what desire does when we try to read the world and light of our own desires and the world refuses to be what we wanted, then complaining is the order of the day. It's the telltale sign of the fact that we are dupes loving being duped. Coming up in part two is useful as the book of Proverbs can be
it also can be a trap because it can build into your way of thinking about the world, the expectation that if I do X, Y will for sure happen. The point of the book of Ecclesiastes is to disabuse you profoundly, deeply, repeatedly, without mercy, to disabuse you of the idea that any such symmetry exists.
