In the second part of our not-so-big meeting on Saturday night, I gave some advice about how to read Proverbs. Since we’re going to spend the next eight months or so in Drivers Ed series of messages on the book of Proverbs, I thought it might be helpful for us to understand what we’re reading.

First, the all important question when reading Scripture: “what genre is this, anyway?” Genre is simply a category or a classification of something, particularly of music or literature. For instance, the music on your iPod might be divided up into various genre: I listen to classical, jazz, rock, and rap (definitely not country!). The books on your shelf at home can be sorted into genre.

The important thing to remember about literary genre is that you read different genre different ways. In a given day, I might read the sports page, an email from Nicole, the electric bill, a biography of a famous Christian, or an advertisement from a car dealership. Do I read all these genre the same way? Do I come these different genre expecting the same kind of information to be communicated in the same form? Of course not! The same thing is true with the various genre in the Bible, whether it is history, poetry, prophecy, or letter.

The book of Proverbs is a special kind of genre known as wisdom literature. It is instruction and advice about how to live our lives in order to serve the Lord, Yahweh. So when we read Proverbs, we should keep these four points in mind:

1. The Book of Proverbs is part of the Bible. Captain Obvious strikes again. It doesn’t take a Biblical scholar to know this, but it also doesn’t take a Biblical scholar to realize that there is not much of a connection in Proverbs to the wider storyline of the Bible. There’s no reference to the Exodus, the Promised Land, the temple, the kings, etc.

But you can see the connection in Proverbs 1:7 - “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.” When you see LORD in caps like that, it’s referring to the name of the God, Yahweh. So Proverbs contains the nitty-gritty details for how to serve this Yahweh. If you want to know who He is and what He’s doing, you’ll need the rest of your Bible. But here are some instructions for how to serve him in your daily life.

2. The Book of Proverbs is in two sections. Chapters 1-9 contain instruction. It’s a series of lessons from a father to his son. It’s like Solomon took his boy over to the nieghborhood Starbucks every Tuesday night for a couple of weeks, and taught him about life. Somebody wrote it down, and we get chapters 1-9.

Chapters 10-31 contain the sayings, the part of Proverbs that usually comes to mind when we think of this book. These are little nuggets of truth designed to give us advice and observations about life.

3. Individual proverbs are snapshots of life. They are generally true, observable in human experience. Proverbs are truisms, meaning that they tend to be true, but aren’t necessarily true in any and every circumstance. An individual Proverb doesn’t necessarily say everything there is to say about a topic. For instance, compare the observation in 17:8 with the warning in 17:23. Some Proverbs are ultimately true, even if they don’t seem to always be true now (16:18, 28:13). Some Proverbs are absolutely true, no matter what the circumstances (15:3).

4. Individual proverbs use poetic imagery. The colorful imagery is intended to ram home a point. Our job is to figure out how the imagery makes that point. It might be a vivid word-picture (18:6, 11:22), a memorable comparison (17:12, 26:18-19), or parallelism, in which the second line of a Proverb expands upon or illustrates the first line (11:12).
There you have it.

Categories: Drivers Ed, five15 blog