Short Sentences Long Remembered E-Book

Leland Ryken

• Herausgeber: Lexham Press
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Reading the Bible as Literature
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 141

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This is the last of a six-volume series called Reading the Bible as Literature. In this series, the author not only explores the intersection of the Bible and literature, but he also shows pastors, students, and teachers of the Bible the beautiful craftsmanship of Proverbs and wisdom literature and how to interpret them correctly. Dr. Ryken goes one step further than merely explaining the genre of Proverbs and wisdom literature by including exercises to help students master this rich literary treasure.

Leseprobe

READING THE BIBLE AS LITERATURE

Short Sentences Long Remembered

A GUIDED STUDY OF PROVERBS AND OTHER WISDOM LITERATURE

LELAND RYKEN

LEXHAM PRESS

Short Sentences Long Remembered: A Guided Study of Proverbs and Other Wisdom Literature

© 2016 by Leland Ryken

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225

LexhamPress.com

First edition by Weaver Book Company.

All rights reserved. You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at [email protected].

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Verse numbers appear in some Scripture quotations when the author refers to or comments on specific verses.

Print ISBN 9781683591603

Digital ISBN 9781683591610

Cover design: Frank Gutbrod

Contents

Series Preface

Introduction:How Wisdom Literature Edifies

1.General Traits of a Proverb

2.The Proverb at Its Core

3.Widening the Scope:Antithesis, Comparison, Analogy, and Proverb Formulas

4.Interpreting Proverbs

5.From Simple Proverb to Prose Paragraph

6.Larger Units

7.A Miscellany of Wisdom Literature Forms

8.The Rhetoric of Persuasion

Series Preface

This series is part of the mission of the publisher to equip Christians to understand and teach the Bible effectively by giving them reliable tools for handling the biblical text. Within that landscape, the niche that my volumes are designed to fill is the literary approach to the Bible. This has been my scholarly passion for nearly half a century. It is my belief that a literary approach to the Bible is the common reader’s friend, in contrast to more specialized types of scholarship on the Bible.

Nonetheless, the literary approach to the Bible needs to be defended against legitimate fears by evangelical Christians, and through the years I have not scorned to clear the territory of misconceptions as part of my defense of a literary analysis of the Bible. In kernel form, my message has been this:

1.To view the Bible as literature is not a suspect modern idea, nor does it need to imply theological liberalism. The idea of the Bible as literature began with the writers of the Bible, who display literary qualities in their writings and who refer with technical precision to a wide range of literary genres such as psalm, proverb, parable, apocalypse, and many more.

2.Although fiction is a common trait of literature, it is not an essential feature of it. A work of literature can be replete with literary technique and artifice while remaining historically factual.

3.To approach the Bible as literature need not be characterized by viewing the Bible only as literature, any more than reading it as history requires us to see only the history of the Bible.

4.When we see literary qualities in the Bible we are not attempting to bring the Bible down to the level of ordinary literature; it is simply an objective statement about the inherent nature of the Bible. The Bible can be trusted to reveal its extraordinary qualities if we approach it with ordinary methods of literary analysis.

5.To sum up, it would be tragic if we allowed ourselves to be deprived of literary methods of analyzing the Bible by claims that are fallacies.

What, then, does it mean to approach the Bible as literature? A literary study of the Bible should begin where any other approach begins—by accepting as true all that the biblical writers claim about their book. These claims include its inspiration and superintendence by God, its infallibility, its historical truthfulness, its unique power to infiltrate people’s lives, and its supreme authority.

With that as a foundation, a literary approach to the Bible is characterized by the following traits:

1.A literary approach acknowledges that the Bible comes to us in a predominantly literary format. In the words of C. S. Lewis, “There is a … sense in which the Bible, since it is after all literature, cannot properly be read except as literature; and the different parts of it as the different sorts of literature they are.”1 The overall format of the Bible is that of an anthology of literature.

2.In keeping with that, a literary approach identifies the genres and other literary forms of the Bible and analyzes individual texts in keeping with those forms. An awareness of literary genres and forms programs how we analyze a biblical text and opens doors into a text that would otherwise remain closed.

3.A literary approach begins with the premise that a work of literature embodies universal human experience. Such truthfulness to human experience is complementary to the tendency of traditional approaches to the Bible to mainly see ideas in it. A literary approach corrects a commonly held fallacy that the Bible is a theology book with proof texts attached.

4.A literary approach to the Bible is ready to grant value to the biblical authors’ skill with language and literary technique, seeing these as an added avenue to our enjoyment of the Bible.

5.A literary approach to the Bible takes its humble place alongside the two other main approaches—the theological and the historical. These three domains are established by the biblical writers themselves, who usually combine all three elements in their writings. However, in terms of space, the Bible is a predominantly literary book. Usually the historical and theological material is packaged in literary form.

These traits and methods of literary analysis govern the content of my series of guided studies to the genres of the Bible.

Although individual books in my series are organized by the leading literary genres that appear in the Bible, I need to highlight that all of these genres have certain traits in common. Literature itself, en masse, makes up a homogenous whole. In fact, we can speak of literature as a genre (the title of the opening chapter of a book titled Kinds of Literature).2 The traits that make up literature as a genre will simply be assumed in the volumes in this series. They include the following: universal, recognizable human experience concretely embodied as the subject matter; the packaging of this subject matter in distinctly literary genres; the authors’ use of special resources of language that set their writing apart from everyday expository discourse; and stylistic excellence and other forms of artistry that are part of the beauty of a work of literature.

What are the advantages that come from applying the methods of literary analysis? In brief, they are as follows: an improved method of interacting with biblical texts in terms of the type of writing that they are; doing justice to the specificity of texts (again because the approach is tailored to the genres of a text); ability to see unifying patterns in a text; relating texts to everyday human experience; and enjoyment of the artistic skill of biblical authors.

Summary

A book needs to be read in keeping with its author’s intention. We can see from the Bible itself that it is a thoroughly literary book. God superintended its authors to write a very (though not wholly) literary book. To pay adequate attention to the literary qualities of the Bible not only helps to unlock the meanings of the Bible; it is also a way of honoring the literary intentions of its authors. Surely biblical authors regarded everything that they put into their writing as important. We also need to regard those things as important.

Introduction

How Wisdom Literature Edifies

This introductory chapter states broad generalizations about the content of wisdom literature and the ways in which that content can edify us. The remaining chapters explore the literary forms that make up wisdom literature. As those chapters unfold, it will be important not to lose sight of the content and edification that wisdom literature is designed to give us. Grasping the literary forms provides the means for interacting with the text itself, but that is a means to a further end. This introductory chapter is designed to provide avenues toward appropriating the truth and edification of wisdom literature. I would encourage readers to come back to the introduction from time to time so as to keep the edification in view.

Who Were the Wise Men Who Composed Wisdom Literature?

Our quest to master the wisdom literature of the Bible needs to begin with a look at the authors. In Old Testament times, the nation of believers recognized three categories of religious leaders—priests, prophets, and wise men. Jeremiah 18:18 helpfully names all three and hints at their respective roles: “the law shall not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet.” (Ezekiel 7:26 uses the same formula, except that “the wise” are there called “elders.”) The division of duties among these religious leaders was approximately as follows: the priests represented the people to God; the prophets brought God’s word to people; the wise men taught their fellow humans. A formula that English poet William Wordsworth used for the poet fits the wise man perfectly: he is “a man speaking to men.”

Two traits immediately emerge from this role of spokesman to people. One is that the wise men excelled in the ability to observe human character and life. The wise men were gifted observers of the human scene. They did not come to their listeners and readers with the oracular authority of the prophets, who prefaced their messages with “thus says the LORD.” Instead, they authenticated their message with an appeal to shared human experience.

But the wise men did more than observe. They also taught. To some extent, the wisdom literature that this guide explores was the equivalent of our classroom instruction. Jeremiah 18:18 and Ezekiel 7:26 both attribute “counsel” to the wise men.

We need to assign one more primary trait to the wise men: in addition to being observers of the human scene and teachers of wisdom, they were wordsmiths. The chief evidence is the proverbs and aphorisms in which they enshrined their observations and instruction. Their “sayings” (a biblical synonym for “proverbs”) sparkle with verbal artistry. They had a way with words that few achieve.

The writer of Ecclesiastes paints a self-portrait near the end of his collection of proverbs, and it is the best possible summary of the wise man and his place in society: “Besides being wise, the Preacher also taught the people knowledge, weighing and studying and arranging many proverbs with great care. The Preacher sought to find words of delight, and uprightly he wrote words of truth” (Eccl. 12:9–10).

What Is Wisdom?

In raising this question, I have in view specifically the view of wisdom that prevails in the wisdom literature of the Bible. No single definition will suffice as an answer to the question of what wisdom literature is. Instead, I offer angles of vision as gleaned from reliable sources.

Wisdom is skill for living. This implies that wisdom focuses on practical daily living and ties into the authors’ task of observing life and human experience as noted above. The book of Proverbs contains observations and advice on such far-flung topics as farming, lawsuits, table manners, money management, avoiding bad companions, choosing a wife, and the delights of having grandchildren. This is not to minimize that other proverbs deal with the spiritual life—fearing God, worshiping properly, and enduring trial. Even here, though, the goal of the wise men is that people will navigate life well rather than poorly—with skill for living, in other words.

Closely aligned to that is a label that someone applied to the epistle of James: faith that works. Implicit in that formula is the idea that the wise men encourage people to act on the basis of their beliefs. This emphasis is not limited to the book of James. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, for example, is a continuous stream of instruction about what Christians need to do and to avoid—action, in other words, in addition to belief. A famous biblical scholar used the formula “experiential knowledge” for this quality of wisdom.

Additionally, a lot will fall into place as we read wisdom literature if we are aware that this body of literature is devoted to the related topics of human conduct and character formation. The wise men are concerned with how people behave or act. But people act in accord with their inner character. We should therefore not view the emphasis on human action as urging people to externally obey a code of conduct. By commanding people to act according to their guidelines, the wise men actually want people to become righteous people.

What Is Aphoristic Thinking?

The adjective “aphoristic” is based on the noun “aphorism.” An aphorism is a proverb—a concise, memorable statement of truth. To produce proverbs requires a special kind of thinking. This thinking starts with the writers of proverbs, but people who then assimilate and perpetuate proverbs by reading, memorizing, and reciting them in real-life situations are also engaging in aphoristic thinking.

One way to understand aphoristic thinking is that it is a quest for order. Life itself is a chaos of individual moments, experiences, and sensations. We have an urge to bring order to this chaos. Aphoristic thinking enables us to master the complexity of life by bringing human experience under the control of an observation that explains it. It does so by observing general principles that organize the repeatable situations of life. If this is true, then aphoristic thinking also expresses an urge for understanding. We are not content simply to experience things; we also want to understand them. A proverb expresses such understanding.

Aphoristic thinking is also a quest for permanence. It is not enough to express an insight and then lose it. Aphoristic thinking seeks to make the insight memorable. If it lives in our memory, it becomes permanent.

What Is the “Big Story,” or Metanarrative, of Wisdom Literature?

Wisdom literature is made up of so many tiny units that it may seem to lack unity, but there is an overarching story that organizes the mass of details. If we simply start reading the book of Proverbs, we will quickly sense that a great conflict is going on in the world. We are constantly confronted with statements that tell us to do A rather than B (portrayed as the opposite of A). The climax of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is an apt summary of this dualistic view of life, with its contrasting picture of the wise man who builds his house on a rock and a foolish man who builds his house on the sand (Matt. 7:24–27).

The great spiritual battle between good and evil produces a related motif, namely, the necessity of choice. We might think of wisdom literature as the drama of the soul’s choice (a phrase Dorothy L. Sayers used for Dante’s Inferno). Even if a proverb is stated as an objective observation, the overall force of wisdom literature is that we understand that we are being confronted with a choice that is unavoidable. “The wage of the righteous leads to life, / the gain of the wicked to sin” (Prov. 10:16). The choice is ours. This motif of choice is well summarized by a passage near the end of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus confronts his listeners with the need to choose between the broad way that leads to destruction and the narrow way that leads to life (Matt. 7:13–14).

How Did the Wise Men Disseminate Their Wisdom?

The social context of wisdom literature is complex and somewhat speculative. For starters, biblical scholars tell us that wisdom was an international phenomenon during the era of the Old Testament wise men. That is not hard to believe, inasmuch as other literary forms cultivated in Bible times show many parallels to those found in surrounding cultures.

Ancient cultures were oral cultures, so it is safe to assume that proverbial wisdom circulated orally as well as in written form. Of course, the wisdom literature of the Bible comes to us in written form. In turn, though, proverbs that we learn from a literary anthology receive their finest moment when they are uttered orally in the everyday situations where they apply. So one of the paradoxes of proverbial literature is that it is both oral and written.