An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 127: Loose women and Mrs. God (Proverbs 6-10)

Proverbs 6-10
Loose women and Mrs. God.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Proverbs 6

“Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:”

Now we seem to come to the actual proverbs themselves. I have a dislike of proverbs and aphorisms – they seem wise but are usually trite, and generally only reflect the prejudices of the speaker. “Look before you leap” – sounds reasonable enough, right? Be cautious, don’t jump to anything rash. “He who hesitates is lost”. Ah, now. Which is it? And of course the answer for something like that is that it is situational. Life is too big and messy to be easily summed up in a pithy statement. Caution is good if you are moving radioactive waste, less good if you are a centre-forward.

Fortunately, the book of Proverbs hasn’t fallen into such a trap, yet. These aren’t snappy little proverbs like you might expect, but more wads of advice that take up several verses apiece. Things Solomon advises his son about here are: don’t be lazy, don’t be cruel, don’t lie and watch out for loose women (specifically, don’t commit adultery). These are all pretty much stuff from the ten commandments and you wouldn’t think they’d need reinforcing. No, wait, what am I saying? Of course they do, since a running theme of the OT seems to be that no-one ever listens to what they should and shouldn’t do. Some of this advise is frustratingly vague – God hates “an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations”, which surely means someone who plots to do something bad and not, for example, Stephen King. But I can easily see that kind of phrase being distorted to reflect the prejudices of the speaker – and here we are back at the start of my argument.

Proverbs 7

“Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman”

Solomon really seems to have a bee in his bonnet about his son getting seduced by some floozy (pot and kettle, Mr. 300 wives?). The bulk of this chapter is all about how to beware of seductresses. Now, going off the idea of treating wisdom as a “sister”, in some respects the “woman with the attire of an harlot” is perhaps meant to be a metaphor for ignorance; like the Dark Side of the Force she is quicker, easier, more seductive.

It could also very easily be read as something fearful and mistrusting of women in general, which makes it a rather uncomfortable read.

Proverbs 8

“Doth not wisdom cry? and understanding put forth her voice?”

More feminine personification, but here it is wisdom who is given a voice, who cries out to people to listen to her, promising riches better than rubies or gold. There’s not a lot of meat here, even though it all sounds quite inspiring. The chapter is pretty much an exhortation to try to gain wisdom. What is intriguing, however, is that the personification of wisdom (again, the Hagia Sophia?) says that she has been present since the formation of the earth, before the seas, and has been a companion to God; “Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him”. It’s an unusual concept – you’d think that “wisdom” would be God, in fact I’m pretty sure it’s been put that way before. Here it’s almost as if the writer is trying to sneak in a male and female-aspected god by the back door, which I quite like. Once again it’s plainly a metaphor, really, but it does slightly turn the theology so far on its head.

Proverbs 9

“Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars”

I knew I’d heard the expression “seven pillars of wisdom”, it’s the title of a book by TE Lawrence (he of “of Arabia” fame). What’s mysterious is that there’s no indication what the seven pillars are (for Lawrence it was a reference to seven cities he was going to write about, according to Dr. Wikipedia); neither was, as I recall, there a particular reference to the great temple of Jerusalem having seven pillars. Curious. Obviously it’s a hint to some kind of buried numerical code in the bible that reveals the location of a lost book by Dan Brown.

More personification of Wisdom as a kind of motherly figure, offering bread and wine to those who are willing to accept tuition. Much of this chapter is about the need to be willing to learn in the first place. Suddenly I have a vision of Yoda muttering sadly “I cannot teach him”. I can’t tell if the “foolish woman” later in the chapter is the personification of folly once again, or an example of the same. And possibly sitting in her doorway calling “passengers who go right on their ways” is a veiled reference to prostitution. This book, although pitched at teaching a man how to be wise, is slipping in some rather thinly disguised advice to women on how the writer thinks they ought to behave.

Proverbs 10

“The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother”

Is this another of Proverbs’ lingering sexisms? If a child is bad it’s the fault of the mother? It’s a bit like that, even if it’s meant differently. Otherwise this chapter is a long list of comparisons between right and wrong, wise and foolish, righteous and wicked. It doesn’t give much in the way of concrete advice, and what there is are mostly variations on the theme of “shut up and listen” – “The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of wisdom” or “Wise men lay up knowledge: but the mouth of the foolish is near destruction” and so on. Certain phrases about violence covering the mouth of the wicked, or prating fools falling, are repeated in full. All very well, but it doesn’t say very much, beyond “good people are good, bad people are bad” once you break it down.