A literary reading of the Book of Proverbs: God as one half of a two-career household.

The Bible is the great repository of the sacred rather than the secular wisdom of our culture, or so we habitually think. Secular wisdom we expect to find elsewhere. And, accordingly, any conflict between the sacred and the secular that involves the Bible at all we expect to be a conflict between the Bible and something else, not a conflict within the Bible.

At least one book of the Old Testament, however, is a collection of Near Eastern secular wisdom rather than of Jewish religious wisdom. And what gives this work, the Book of Proverbs, a particular literary interest is that its secular wisdom seems to be carried in feminine rather than masculine hands. The Book of Proverbs does not explicitly oppose its secular wisdom to religious belief, much less its feminine perspective to any masculine perspective. But if one reads the Hebrew Scriptures in the traditional Jewish order, the Book of Proverbs is preceded by the Book of Psalms, and the sense of contrast - religious to secular and, subtly, male to female - as one moves from the one collection to the next is intriguing. (The Jewish order of the Scriptures places Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets in the middle, not at the end of what Christians call the Old Testament.)

God's law, which in Psalms is regarded as his most important, most abiding, and most deeply personal self-expression, yields much of its space in Proverbs to a more loosely defined, anonymous, impersonal tradition of secular wisdom, which is "preached" by Lady Wisdom, a mysteriously allegorical combination of goddess, prophetess, and angelic messenger. The emergence of Lady Wisdom as God's handmaiden or consort is accompanied by Proverbs' paradoxical reversal of the role that Psalms assigns to God.

In Psalms, God is the guarantor of justice in a world of karma without samsara - a world, that is, in which God rewards the good and punishes the evil within their own lifetimes or, at most, in the lifetimes of their children or grandchildren. Not quite so in Proverbs, where God appears for the first time (regarding the Hebrew Bible in the Jewish order) as the mysterious being to whom reference must be made and recourse had when just the opposite occurs - that is, when the good are seen to be punished and the wicked rewarded.

God continues to be honored as the creator, through Wisdom, of the moral as well as the physical world, but the moral world he has created, like the physical world, enjoys an immanent order. It is a world, in other words, in which reward for the good and punishment for the wicked is on the whole a natural and therefore automatic outcome. It is not usually necessary for God to insure the functioning of this moral order by intervening ad hoc with rewards and punishments. These come about as the intrinsic result of mankind's cultivation, or otherwise, of human wisdom, a pursuit sometimes characterized as devotion to Lady Wisdom. God created the world through her, Proverbs says, and the world's normal and normally benign functioning is in her custody. God takes or is presumed to take a direct hand only in counterintuitive, unpredicted, unwelcome limit cases. In brief, when things go right automatically, as Proverbs expects that they will, God is honored as the creator of a world in which things go right automatically, while when things go wrong, God is acknowledged as the source and explanation of exceptions to the rule. In Proverbs, God is marginal as a picture frame is marginal. He is not often in the picture, but the picture requires him.

This quasi-negative but necessary framing function for God is the meaning of a proverb - "The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord" - which is repeated almost as a mantra three times in Proverbs (1:7, 9:10, and 15:33). Its meaning, in a secular formulation, might be: "The first thing a man of understanding must understand is that there is much that he will never understand." Mankind will ever strive to bring life under control, and Proverbs commends that effort. But a man who does not recognize how much inevitably will escape his control is doomed to frustration and despair. Human understanding is, so to speak, never more than a clearing in the forest, and it is best to be prepared for this at the outset. Proverbs 16 gives this view, which is the basis for the reconciliation of Jewish Torah and secular Near Eastern wisdom, an extended gloss:

A man may arrange his thoughts, But what he says depends on the Lord. All the ways of a man seem right to him, But the Lord probes motives. Entrust your affairs to the Lord, And your plans will succeed. The Lord made everything for a purpose, Even the wicked for an evil day (16:1-4).

There is no easy transposition of this last line into a secular key. Even an impersonal reformulation - "Everything has been made for a purpose, even the wicked for an evil day" - requires an act of faith. Now as then, it is at just this point that secular wisdom reaches its limit.

By speaking this way, the Book of Proverbs differs strikingly from the Book of Psalms in its implicit characterization of God. Proverbs 16:4 rebuffs the entreaty heard in literally scores of psalms that the Lord put the petitioner's wicked enemies in their place, give them what they deserve, and give the righteous petitioner his own due. "No," the Lord is here imagined to respond, "I have my purpose for them, and you must endure them."

This is both a drastic restriction and a drastic revision of the role that God otherwise assumes as protagonist of the Bible. In a sense, mankind now becomes the protagonist, and God the antagonist. The happier outcomes are assigned to human effort, and God is assigned ultimate, personal responsibility for those times when the opposition, human and circumstantial, proves insuperable. He is made, in a remarkable way, the personification of all that opposes human effort; and as such, he becomes, if not the explanation of it, then at least a name for it. In other words, instead of saying, "there is no figuring it out," Proverbs says "thore is no figuring him out." Instead of saying "there is nothing to be done about it," Proverbs says "there is nothing to be done about him."

Secular, contemporary reformulations tend to make impersonal the sort of thing that Proverbs makes personal. Thus, for example, "Into each life some rain must fall" or such uglier, more recent versions as "Life's a bitch, and then you die" or "Shit happens." But these actually fall short as reformulations of Proverbs 16:4 because they are in no way confessions that life exceeds the speaker's understanding. On the contrary, they are smug in their confidence that all relevant evidence has been examined and that the ugly result is an utter certainty. In order to avoid claiming omniscience, vulgar realism would have to admit mystery in some way and thereby cease to be as terminally secular as it wishes to be.

Though 16:4, "The Lord made everything for a purpose/Even the wicked for an evil day," may have been most comforting to those who assumed that the Lord was good, the same line has a liberating potential even if nothing is assumed other than that the Lord is mysterious or even, at a further reduction, that life is a mystery and not just a mess. Better a humble but at least potentially merciful uncertainty, in short, than a proud and inevitably masochistic certainty. This is perhaps Pascal's wager two millennia before Pascal. And yet it is scarcely a triumphant moment for God himself. The world once up and running, God is now only to be summoned when things are at their worst, and so he is all but forced to be always and only his own worst self. "Comfort, comfort my people," the words he spoke to Isaiah, are now words he no longer is expected ever to speak. In most troubles, mankind comforts itself or has itself to blame. There is little scope at all for his tender mercies. Rather than a comforting person, he seems in the Book of Proverbs to be a semicomforting assumption at best and a hostile opponent at worst.

To read Proverbs after reading Psalms is rather like leaving the steamy murmur of a dim, crowded church where hidden agonies and immoderate hopes have all been on sometimes painful display and stepping into the crisp briskness of the marketplace outside the church door - close enough, to be sure, but still outside. The stakes out here in the broad daylight may be much lower, the only eloquence a rough-and-ready tartness of repartee, and yet there is something bracing about the change. Everyone still believes in God, indeed casually refers to him in every other sentence, but everyone also seems to have other business than God's in hand and to be relying on mother wit, as we might well put it, rather than on father or grandfather God. The Lord God in the Book of Proverbs begins to seem an elderly relative still nominally the head of the house but no longer very active as a manager.

In Proverbs' synthesis between Torah and wisdom, Torah - or at least the God whom Torah honors as its author - deepens wisdom. But wisdom also broadens and brightens Torah by discussing such matters as character formation and prudence, parts of human moral experience about which Torah is generally silent. The most surprising feature of this new synthesis, however, is that in it prophecy, about which Psalms maintains a notably pained silence, is revived, after a fashion, as Lady Wisdom preaching on a street corner. But what kind of prophecy does she preach? Dispensing with impassioned indictments, intoxicated visions, all mention of sinful foreign countries, and any prediction of apocalyptic doom, she has the mannerisms of a prophetess but a message that scarcely goes beyond "If you make a fool of yourself, don't say I didn't warn you." Her revival of prophecy is, in a way, its burial:

Wisdom cries aloud in the streets, Raises her voice in the squares. At the head of the busy streets she calls; At the entrance of the gates, in the city, she speaks out: "How long will you simple ones love simplicity, You scoffers be eager to scoff, You dullards hate knowledge? You are indifferent to my rebuke; I will now speak my mind to you, And let you know my thoughts. Since you refused me when I called, And paid no need when I extended my hand, You spurned all my advice, And would not hear my rebuke, I will laugh at your calamity, And mock when terror comes upon you. When terror comes like a disaster, And calamity arrives like a whirlwind, When trouble and distress come upon you. Then they shall call me but I will not answer; They shall seek me but not find me. Because they hated knowledge, And did not choose fear of the Lord; They refused my advice, And disdained all my rebukes, They shall eat the fruit of their ways, And have their fill of their own counsels. The tranquillity of the simple will kill them, And the complacency of dullards will destroy them. But he who listens to me will dwell in safety, Untroubled by the terror of misfortune" (1:20-33, italics added).

In biblical prophecy, the events mentioned in the italicized lines above would have been presented as punishment rather than, as here, mere comeuppance. Here the only punishment is self-inflicted; it is simply the predictable, built-in consequence of foolish behavior.

Is it surprising that this clearest, largest eruption of the feminine into the relationship of mankind and God should turn out to speak with the voice of common sense? That will depend, obviously, on what you understand by "the feminine" as also on what you expect of a mother or a wife. Historical criticism has paid little attention to the possibility that Wisdom may be either mankind's mother or God's wife, but this is largely because historical criticism has generally taken Lady Wisdom to be an ancient writer's personification of the wisdom of the male God and therefore, notwithstanding the feminine grammatical endings, male herself. She has been seen as a figure of speech loosely akin to the Word of the Lord in the endlessly repeated figure of speech "Then the Word of the Lord came to...."

I mention historical criticism and "God's wife" in the same sentence by design. Historical criticism, the dominant form of secular Bible criticism for decades, has had to abstain from synthetic characterization of the deity whom its own research has, so to speak, surrounded. The evidence historians have amassed strongly suggests that the God of Ancient Israel arose as an amalgam of several ancient Semitic deities. However, because God is not himself a fact of history, historians are confined to talking about those who believed in him at one stage or another of his development.

Literary criticism offers, at this point, a supplement and an alternative, for whatever else God may be, he is, as the protagonist of a great literary work, a fact of the imagination, and literary critics are free to talk about him as such. A literary critic discussing Hamlet, the protagonist of Hamlet, may not stop with a discussion of William Shakespeare and the audience he wrote for. Those matters are more properly the province of the historian or historical critic. So also the literary critic discussing God, the protagonist of the Bible, may not stop with questions of authorship and ancient audience but must proceed to the direct discussion of God himself.

A literary characterization must take God as and only as he is found on the pages of the Bible - whether we understand this to mean, as here, the pages of the Tanakh (the Hebrew Scripture, the Jewish Bible) or the pages of the Christian Bible (The Old Testament and the New Testament). But that limitation - which philosophers and theologians, who have other sources than the Bible, properly escape - is balanced by the literary critic's right and obligation to include everything about God that is found on the pages of the work: the unedifying as well as the edifying, the purely fanciful as well as the philosophically profound, and so forth. Nothing may be ruled out because it is early (and primitive) or late (and corrupt). To entertain such considerations is to behave like a historian. Similarly, nothing may be ruled out because it is crude or legalistic or polemical or even inconsistent. These are dismissals that may be necessary for a theologian seeking to provide a rationalized account of God to a living religious community, but the literary critic must allow God as much interior disorder as he allows any other literary character.

The form of disorder that presents itself in the Book of Proverbs is the imperfect suppression of the feminine in the Lord. Among the deities whose personalities fused to create the Lord, one was El, the ancient Canaanite sky God. El's consort was Asherah; and figuratively speaking, when El disappeared into the emergent, celibate Lord, Asherah became a widow. At that point she could have followed El, disappearing into the Lord as her husband had done, but in fact she lived on for a time as the Lord's half-acknowledged, half-denied spouse.

Denunciations of the cult of Asherah in 2 Kings make it quite clear that she lived on both as the center of her own cult and as the spouse of the Lord. Recent archeological discoveries have reinforced this view. In time, she faded away to at most a feminine dimension in the character of the Lord, the one surviving deity. But in the Book of Proverbs, at least if we read this book as a literary critic would read it, she may be said to return in disguise as human wisdom in a feminine personification.

In Proverbs, Lady Wisdom speaks not just for God but also in her own name about God and about her relationship with him. The word goddess probably does misrepresent her; but even taking her as allegorical rather than mythological, she represents human wisdom in the newly autonomous sense of which we were speaking above rather than divine wisdom. As such, she may well be spoken of both as God's consort (mankind cooperating with God), and as mankind's mother (mankind caring for God's children and its own). And as both consort and mother,.Wisdom wakes the echoes of Asherah, the archaic spouse of El, inherited by Yahweh.

Wisdom speaks of her double relationship with God and mankind at Proverbs 8:22-9:6:

"The Lord created me at the beginning of His course As the first of His works of old. In the distant past I was fashioned, At the beginning, at the origin of earth. There was still no deep when I was brought forth, No springs rich in water; Before [the foundation of] the mountains were sunk, Before the hills I was born. He had not yet made earth and fields, Or the world's first clumps of clay. I was there when He set the heavens into place; When He fixed the horizon upon the deep; When He made the heavens above firm, And the fountains of the deep gushed forth; When He assigned the sea its limits, So that its waters never transgress His command; When He fixed the foundations of the earth, I was with Him as a confidant, A source of delight every day, Rejoicing before Him at all times, Rejoicing in His inhabited world, Finding delight with mankind. Now, sons, listen to me; Happy are they who keep my ways. Heed discipline and become wise; Do not spurn it. Happy is the man who listens to me, Coming early to my gates each day, Waiting outside my doors. For he who finds me finds life And obtains favor from the Lord. But he who misses me destroys himself; All who hate me love death."

Wisdom has built her house, She has hewn her seven pillars. She has prepared the feast, Mixed the wine, And also set the table. She has sent out her maids to announce On the heights of the town, "Let the simple enter here"; To those devoid of sense she says, "Come, eat my food And drink the wine that I have mixed; Give up simpleness and live, Walk in the way of understanding."

At the point in this speech where Wisdom says to mankind, "Now, sons, listen to me," the burden of proof might seem to shift to those who would deny that she is in any way a mother, not just because of the use of the word banim, "sons" or "children," but also because of the clearly parental manner. But in what sense, if any, can the speaker be a wife? True, the fact that God has created her by no means rules out this possibility. As his wife, in any ancient Near Eastern context, she would not need to be his uncreated equal. Nothing would prevent him from creating her as his consort after or - as she insists - before creating mankind. No, the difficulty in naming Wisdom as God's consort seems to lie rather in the fact that, despite his delight in her, she seems as much assistant as companion. She is a builder, a butcher, a baker, a vintner, as well as a teacher and a "confidant." But does all this taken together make her a wife?

Obviously, one must first ask: What is a wife? In the entire Bible, there is only one extended description of the wife, and it comes, as it happens, in just this book, at Proverbs 31:10-31, which opens:

What a rare find is a capable wife! Her worth is far beyond that of rubies. Her husband puts his confidence in her, And lacks no good thing. She is good to him, never bad, All the days of her life. She looks for wool and flax, And sets her hand to them with a will. She is like a merchant fleet, Bringing her food from afar. She rises while it is still night, And supplies provisions for her household, The daily fare of her maids. She sets her mind on an estate and acquires it; She plants a vineyard by her own labors. She girds herself with strength And performs her tasks with vigor (31:10-17).

In the ancient Near East, wives were both a form and a source of wealth for their husbands. Like Lady Wisdom, the good wife in the description just quoted combines delight with good management. If we find this combination in Lady Wisdom, we may infer, therefore, that she is to be considered, at least metaphorically, as God's wife. She and God do not have even an analogous genital relationship. There is not the slightest hint of that in the text. But she is genuinely female in the same characterological w~y that he is always genuinely male, and their partnership to that extent is a connubium. And if in addition she represents mankind as a whole, where is the difficulty? In the prophets, God has repeatedly and ardently called himself Israel's husband, turning Israel's covenant into a sacred marriage. Here, he would be mankind's husband in a relationship in which mankind plays the role of an unusually vigorous and self-reliant wife.

It need come as no surprise that as the Old Testament turns its attention to practical skills, its attention to women should grow. Before as well as after the exile, several of Israel's larger neighbors enjoyed a noticeably higher level of material development than Israel did as well as a deeper integration into world commerce. The skilled workmen who built David's palace and Solomon's temple were brought in from Phoenicia. Certainly before and probably after the exile, foreign wives were a major channel by which non-Israelite material culture entered Israelite life. Despite the severe strictures placed on intermarriage in Torah, Moses, David, and, most notoriously, Solomon (not to speak of Abraham, Judah, and Joseph), all are reported to have had foreign wives. Solomon's many wives are blamed in 1 Kings for the introduction of foreign religion into Israel, but doubtless they also brought foreign crafts, languages, music, food, and so on - in short, all the foreign forms of industry and wealth - with them as well, and doubtless they taught what they brought with them to their Israelite sisters. Over time, the sense may well have grown up in Israel that women, especially foreign women, were the repository of much of the material expertise of the world.

If this is the case, then we should not assume that every time Proverbs begins one of its anonymous speeches "My son," a father is to be imagined as the speaker. The New Revised Standard Version's "inclusive language," substituting "My child" for "My son" throughout, is at odds with the content of a good many speeches that seem explicitly aimed at young men; but if it is rarely easy to imagine a young woman as the hearer, it is often quite easy to imagine an older woman as the speaker. Not that Proverbs is a feminist text: By contemporary standards, it is serenely sexist, inveighing repeatedly, for example, against the loose woman with nary a word about the loose man. But often a closer look exposes an interesting ambiguity, especially, as it happens, where sexual morality is concerned.

Who is speaking in Proverbs 7, a long speech against the loose woman that is barely begun before it turns to an eyewitness account of seduction as seen through a latticed window? A man might, of course, witness a seduction through a latticed window, but this is just the vantage from which, in a Near Eastern society accustomed to female enclosure, a respectable woman would be most likely to witness such a scene. It is easy to imagine, as a result, that "my son" is being warned against the loose woman by his mother. Daringly, the speaker imagines a woman of her own social class, a woman married to a man of some means, betraying her husband in his absence by seducing a young stranger. Who but a mother could imagine so well what a woman of a certain age might say to an innocent like her boy?

From the window of my house, Through my lattice, I looked out And saw among the simple, Noticed among the youths, A lad devoid of sense. He was crossing the street near her corner, Walking toward her house In the dusk of evening, In the dark hours of night. A woman comes toward him Dressed like a harlot, with set purpose. She is bustling and restive; She is never at home. Now in the street, now in the square, She lurks at every comer. She lays hold of him and kisses him; Brazenly she says to him, "I had to make a sacrifice of well-being; Today I fulfilled my vows. Therefore I have come out to you, Seeking you, and have found you. I have decked my couch with covers Of dyed Egyptian linen; I have sprinkled my bed With myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Let us drink our fill of love till morning; Let us delight in amorous embrace. For the man of the house is away; He is off on a distant journey. He took his bag of money with him And will return only at mid-month" (7:6-20).

Female authorship seems plausible for this passage on another ground than the lattice window. Though obviously full of resentment and censure, the writer is quite without the kind of visceral revulsion that the prophets so often seem to feel at the very thought of a woman in a state of sexual arousal. The writer sees the loose woman as, with all her faults, a fellow human being and not, as a Jeremiah would see her, as a beast in heat:

A wild she-donkey, at home in the desert, snuffing the breeze in desire; who can control her when she is in heat? Males need not trouble to look for her, they will find her in her month

(Jeremiah 2:24; Jerusalem Bible).

Metaphorical prostitution and literal prostitution, male as well as female, are inseparable for the prophets, and for a good reason: When Jeremiah begins his indictment of Israel for Baal-worship by saying, "On every high hill and under every green tree you have sprawled and played the whore," he is referring to sacral fornication that was a part of the fertility cult of Baal and Asherah. But what is it that appalls him more, apostasy or fornication? For Proverbs, a whore at her most brazen is not to be compared to an unclean animal in heat.

Proverbs may have occasional sharp words about sexual misconduct, but much of the time its writers simply show a lively interest in the subject. Whom do we imagine, what kind of man or woman, juxtaposing the following two bons mots?

1. Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a maiden.

2. This is the way of an adulteress: she eats, and wipes her mouth, and says, "I have done no wrong" (RSV: Prov. 30:18-20).

This is, as the saying goes, splitting the arrow, a bull's eye followed by another bull's eye, eloquence about the wonder of sexual love followed by superb bluntness about the ugliness to which it can sometimes degenerate. There is no reason whatsoever why "my son" might not have seen both arrows shot by his mother.

So might he also have heard from her, especially given her demonstrated interest in industry and the practical arts, the wry and pungent lesson offered at 6:6-11:

Lazybones, go to the ant; Study its ways and learn. Without leaders, officers, or rulers, It lays up its stores during the summer, Gathers in its food at the harvest. How long will you lie there, lazybones; When will you wake from your sleep?: A bit more sleep, a bit more slumber, A bit more hugging yourself in bed, And poverty will come calling upon you, And want, like a man with a shield.

Surely it is beyond argument that, time out of mind, Jewish parents, like all parents, have found themselves urging industry upon their children. And yet until Proverbs such sentiments do not receive even the most modest formal accommodation in Jewish religious experience. No book of the Old Testament before Proverbs contains anything comparable to "Go to the ant." The decalogue contains no commandment "Thou shalt work." And on innumerable occasions God has stressed in speaking to his people that it was on his power rather than their own that they should rely. Perhaps the most striking example of this is Deuteronomy 6:10-12:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land that He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to assign to you - great and flourishing cities that you did not build, houses full of all good things that you did not fill, hewn cisterns that you did not hew, vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant - and you eat your fill, take heed that you do not forget the Lord who freed you from the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.

Moses is not licensing laziness per se, but his aggressive deemphasis of the importance of human effort in Israelite achievement began a tradition which continues unbroken to the point we have now reached - not, we may be sure, in the unwritten life of the nation but very definitely in its written literature.

Sigmund Freud defined happiness, famously, as "Lieben und Arbeiten," "love and work." Lady Wisdom, as we have just seen, is frank about sex and frankly interested in sex, a hard worker and an advocate of hard work. She is not Asherah redux, but she does take Asherah's ancient symbol, the tree, as her own:

She [Wisdom] is a tree of life to those who grasp her, And whoever holds on to her is happy (Prov. 3:18).

We may recall that the tree of life was the tree whose fruit the Lord God feared Adarn and Eve would "take also...and eat, and live forever" (Gen. 3:22). This tree was the second for which the Lord God was concerned. The first, the object of his direct prohibition, was the one called "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." After Adam and Eve ate from that tree, the Lord God said: "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil." However, for Adam and Eve themselves, that first tree seems to have been not very unlike the spreading green tree of Asherah, for when they tasted its fruit, they knew desire for the first time: "Then...they knew that they were naked."

When Lady Wisdom places herself in the primal scene of creation, close to God in a relationship of delight, and when we find her represented by the tree of life, a tree standing not just for sexual fertility but for all the practical skills that support life, we hear many echoes of Asherah. But if Asherah once feminized God's character by being absorbed into it, Wisdom remains distinct from him by representing, instead, collective humanity, God's image and God's antagonist. God's full command to his image at Gen. 1:28 was: "Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living things that creep on earth." If the first half of that command was a command to beget and bear children, the second half was a command to use wisdom - the created, human strengths of mind and body - to provide all that children would require. God's relationship with Adam and Eve, though the word covenant is never used of his relationship with them, was implicitly a covenant that, minimally, he would not prevent what he had commanded. But then, at the flood, he did prevent it; and after the flood, his covenant with Abraham compromised it. Lady Wisdom personifies mankind, by a roundabout path indeed, obeying God's initial command and reclaiming God's initial promise.