Wisdom on the Fabric Shelf

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 18th

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Most people who read the Bible approach it already holding some preconceived understanding of what it is all about. Even if we’ve never read it before, we might open the Bible expecting to read about salvation—expecting that it’s a book about how to save our souls. We might begin reading it with the assumption that it will tell us how to get to heaven, or what the meaning of life is, or what God is planning for the world. Christians often assume that the Bible is a book about Jesus, start to finish, and that the whole thing is one coherent story leading up to Jesus’ death and resurrection. Even those of us who know the Bible well often approach it with assumptions like these—that the Bible is ready to provide a single perspective or tell a single story, that it’s a whole cloth stretching from one end to the other.

But as a collection of 66 different books (in the Protestant canon), books that are themselves composed of a dizzying number of distinct sources, the Bible tells a lot of different stories and offers a variety of perspectives. While we might try to impose a coherence on the Bible and find through-lines from beginning to end, the Bible wasn’t composed or collected with that kind of storytelling in mind, and it doesn’t do a very good job of catering to our need for a single overarching perspective. The Bible is not a whole cloth, and it’s not even really like a quilt made of different pieces sewn together. Instead, the Bible is something like a pile of fabric, or a box or shelf full of cut-out pieces—some whole, some fragments, some belonging together, and others a remnant of something else. We can do some sewing and make the whole thing fit together, more or less, but it doesn’t come to us that way. The Bible, as a collection, is a little bit chaotic and variegated, and it’s only through a lot of interpretation that it comes to mean those things that I mentioned in the first paragraph—that it comes to mean something about salvation, or the world, or the nature of God. It’s only by doing a lot of sewing that we end up with a quilt.

I say all that as a way to introduce the theme of the lectionary texts for August 18^th: Wisdom. Among the plot-lines that we can trace through the Bible—among the pieces of fabric making up the quilts we sew from it—Wisdom isn’t one of the major ones. It isn’t a top-line recurring theme, like enslavement in Egypt or the captivity in Babylon. Wisdom doesn’t show up from beginning to end like the lives of Abraham or Moses. It doesn’t hold pride of place in our imaginations about the Bible like the teachings of Jesus do. But Wisdom is a thread that runs through the whole thing, never very prominent but also never quite out of view, like a pattern and color that appears all through the quilt but never really takes over. Wisdom is sometimes a subplot to the big stories we pick out of the Bible, but it’s almost never the main narrative. And this week, the lectionary focuses our attention on this part of the story and asks us to observe the way Wisdom shows up in different ways and in different places, and the ways Wisdom offers a subtle but persistent counter-story, if we are willing to notice.

One really interesting aspect of Wisdom in the Bible is that it’s personified—she is personified. In the Bible, Wisdom is a woman. This has always surprised me a little bit, if I’m being honest, because it just seems so unlikely. The texts that make up the Bible all arose out of intensely patriarchal societies, where most of the virtue and honor belonged to men—at least in the ways virtue and honor were socially constructed and portrayed in the main plots of the biblical texts. The main stories of Genesis and Exodus and Joshua and Judges and Kings and Samuel are about men, for example, with the rare stories of women being the exceptions that prove the rule. We might get a Deborah or a Jael occasionally, but their stories mostly remind us how much the rest of the stories belong to men. The patriarchy of the Bible is persistent and durable, showing up and prevailing almost everywhere. But one of the rare places where maleness isn’t prized—the rare instance where the honor and the virtue belong to a woman and the story gets a true heroine—is in the sections on Wisdom.

In Proverbs 8-9, we meet the woman Wisdom. The lectionary passage is Proverbs 9:1-6, but that’s a snippet of a larger cloth. Beginning in Proverbs 8:1 and stretching through 9:6—and elsewhere in the so-called “Wisdom” sections of the Hebrew Bible—Wisdom appears as a divine force, a guide for good living, and a beguiling figure beckoning us toward insight. Wisdom is portrayed in this part of Proverbs as a woman who waits patiently for people to seek her out, who shows human beings how to live properly and relate to God, and who has been present since the foundations of the world. Wisdom is sent by God to offer well-being to humanity. “Happy is the one who listens to me,” Wisdom says in the section at the end of chapter 8, just before the section that the lectionary offers this week, “watching daily and my gates, waiting beside my doors.” “For whoever finds me finds life,” it continues, “and obtains favor from the LORD, but those who miss me injure themselves; all who hate me love death.” Wisdom, here, is a reliable guide both to God and to the living of life—the very things we often think we will find when we crack open the Bible. It’s fascinating to me that such a thoroughly patriarchal collection of texts offers a guide to lead us to the very thing so many people claim to want from it, but it turns out that the guide is in the form of a woman, the last place many of the male characters in the Bible (and many of its readers) would think to look. Maybe that’s the point.

Wisdom shows up throughout the Bible, sometimes personified as a woman and sometimes not. The “Wisdom literature,” which includes Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes, is preoccupied with Wisdom and the questions she guides us through: the right way to live life, the best way to understand our relationship with God, and how to make meaning out of existence. But Wisdom (and wisdom) show up in other places too. The lectionary this week offers two Psalms, one that makes mention of Wisdom and one that only alludes to it. Psalm 111 makes a link between fear and wisdom that might seem strange to us, but that is pretty common in the Bible: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” it says. And Psalm 34:9-14 also mentions the “fear of the LORD,” and it offers the kind of practical advice that the Proverbs often do. Here, “fear” doesn’t necessarily mean terror or avoidance, but it means something more like awe. “Fear of the LORD,” for these wisdom texts, is a sign that a person is living in accordance with Wisdom’s guidance—that they are moving prudently and wisely through the world.

We even get a short passage from Ephesians in this week’s readings, in which the author is exhorting people toward wisdom (though not Wisdom, it seems) as a response to the “evil” days in which they live. They are encouraged to live uprightly—not to get drunk, but to sing hymns, and to live as wise people.

But perhaps the part of the quilt that’s easiest to pick out this week—the fabric that stands out from the rest and grabs our attention—is the story from 1 Kings about Solomon. The lectionary has been following David’s reign for a while now, and this week’s passage begins with David’s death and the ascension of his son Solomon to the throne. Solomon is portrayed in conflicted terms, just like his father David often was: Solomon is faithful both to God and to his father’s legacy, the text tells us, but Solomon’s religious life is described here in 1 Kings in ambivalent ways. “Solomon loved the LORD, walking in the statutes of his father David; only, he sacrificed and offered incense at the high places.” That’s the NRSV; the NRSVue substitutes “but” for “only,” further highlighting the yes-and-no way Solomon is being described here.

I was curious about the way Solomon and his religious life were being described here, so I reached out to my colleague Amy Erickson, who is smarter than me in every way but especially when it comes to Hebrew Bible and Hebrew language. The “high places” described in this passage show up everywhere in the Hebrew Bible, and usually they are bad. “High places” after the construction of the first temple (by Solomon, later in his story) were usually associated with illicit or impious religion; they were a place to worship other gods away from the Jerusalem temple and the watchful eye of the priests. But it’s ambiguous here, whether that’s what Solomon is doing or not. The way I read the passage is that Solomon was especially eager to please God by following in his father’s devotional footsteps; he kept up the cultic activities, and even went to extremes, offering a thousand burnt offerings in verse 3:4. Then, in 3:5, God offers Solomon his choice of gifts, which seems like the kind of thing a deity would do if a person’s religiosity had been pleasing. My colleague Dr. Erickson suggested that the person who wrote 1 Kings was living in a time when the “high places” were illicit, but knew that in Solomon’s day visiting the high places would have been ok and even good. So the “only” or the “but” in 3:3 (raq in the Hebrew) is a way to express some ambivalence about Solomon’s actions—the same kind of ambivalence that was often used to describe David his father.

In any case, when God offers Solomon his choice of blessings, Solomon asks for wisdom. It’s framed, in 3:9, as a request for discernment in government—perhaps revealing the kind of anxiety that was on the new king’s mind. Solomon wanted to be able to rule effectively, and he asked God for help with that, instead of riches or power over his enemies. Because God was pleased with the request, God gave Solomon wisdom plus all that other stuff too.

I am not sure whether Solomon would have known the traditions about Wisdom the woman who leads and instructs people through life—though Solomon himself is said to have written portions of the Wisdom literature. But his request in 1 Kings seems very much in keeping with that Wisdom tradition; he wants to obtain Wisdom as a way to be more successful in his life and his work. It seems like he’s consciously choosing a part of his tradition to incorporate into his life—that he’s choosing the fabric of Wisdom to make up a large portion of his quilt—and that his choice pleases God.

That leads me to wonder about the choices we make and the living of our own lives in a very different time and place. In the biblical texts, Wisdom is both a guide to living a good life and a reward for it; God recognizes when people seek Wisdom and God sends her our way to help us navigate the world, and God sends Wisdom to recognize the ways we are doing our best. Despite all the differences between our world and the world of Proverbs and 1 Kings, life still holds all the same fundamental uncertainties and mysteries, and it can still be difficult in all the same ways. Wisdom still beckons us, and she asks us to meet her and follow her. God still sends Wisdom our way to help us along. The quilt we’ve sewn out of the shelf full of different pieces that is the Bible is expansive and varied, but Wisdom should stand out to us and draw our attention, as she is always trying to do. “You who are simple, turn in here,” she calls out from her house, inviting us to enter and stay a while. Wisdom will be waiting when we respond.