Proverbs - RRB Notes

 RRB Notes on Proverbs - Introduction

The author of the book is Solomon (Prov. 25:1), and he has added to his collection (1 Kings 4:32) some sayings of “Lemuel” and “Agur” (Prov. 30:1, 31:1). This has given critical scholarship some cause for gnat-straining and has led many to believe the book is a collection of random authors with Solomon’s name attached. But anybody who studies the Alexandrian Cult has heard this “song and dance” before (see App. 8 on Higher Criticism).

Most of the book was written around 1000 B.C. It is part of the Old Testament called the “Wisdom Books.” Since the New Testament tells you that “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are in Jesus Christ (Col. 2:3), you are recommended to those books to get your wisdom. Anything in the entire body of Greek philosophy (800 – 100 B.C.) that is true, came from Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs, written more than 200 years before Homer wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Proverbs has 31 chapters, 915 verses, and 15,043 words. The word proverbs itself has within it the meanings of: 1) to make something like something, 2) to have dominion, 3) to make a similitude or comparison, or 4) to set two things in place side by side. Since that is the exact way God reveals wisdom (Hos. 12:10), it means that two little one syllable words, “as” and “like,” will open up more Scriptural truth to any reader than several years fooling with the “original languages.”

The Proverbs are designed to impart wisdom by “comparing spiritual things with spiritual” (1 Cor. 2:13). You can waste a lot of time following the scholars who talk about Proverbs being composed of distichs, tristitchs, tetrastichs, pentastichs, and hexastichs that are synonymous, antithetical, integral, progressive, parabolic, or numerical. None of the men who give this kind of analysis were able to expound Proverbs 5:4, 6:13, 7:10, 8:9, 11:30, 12:4, 18:1-2, 20:26, 25:7, 27:6, 30:14, or 31:8-9 with any clarity.

The book of Proverbs, along with Ecclesiastes, is “the philosophers book of philosophy,” written by the wisest man who ever lived, according to the God who made men. God said that no man who followed Solomon would be as wise as Solomon was. When men professed to be, the Lord said, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent” (1 Cor. 1:19, 25, 27, 29). This means that all philosophy, both Greek and modern, is just one massive heap of muddled nonsense by stuffy, egotistical, pseudo-sophisticated blockheads trying to imitate the wisdom of God.

In Proverbs, you were told to whom to go for wisdom (Prov. 8:13-36) and what would happen if you got it from another place (Prov. 1:22-33).