Proverbs: meant to be read cumulatively and communally

There is a way of reading Proverbs that seems right to a man, but the end thereof is . . . disillusionment? That's my tongue-in-cheek translation of Proverbs 16:25. I'm referring to a way of reading Proverbs that takes individual proverbs out of context and absolutizes them. For instance, Christian parents should take great comfort from Proverbs 22:6 "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." I do! Yet we've seen examples where children of godly parents have departed from the way of life and never returned. Do these examples give the lie to 22:6? Well, no. Proverbs was meant to be read in it's entirety, with each proverb building on the others to give a full picture of life lived coram Deo.

Incidentally, some Old Testament scholars believe Ecclesiastes was a response to a way of reading Proverbs that turned it into a collection of failsafe principals. Qoheleth "the Preacher" seems to contradict the author(s) of Proverbs at a number of points. The righteous don't always prosper. Some times the hard worker starves, while the lazy man grows fat. Calamity overtakes the wise and the foolish. This is vanity. But back to Proverbs . . .

Today at the Redeemer City to City blog Tim Keller shares some of his insights from preaching through Proverbs. He says that this ancient book of wisdom is both more and less than we moderns typically take it to be. Keller writes:

So Proverbs cannot be "dipped into". It only repays very long study in which you keep the whole book in your head and compare passage with passage. How is that best done? In a community! Some commentators argue that the book of Proverbs was originally written as a manual to be studied by a community of young men under the mentorship of older men -- for a number of years. Each proverb was to be discussed and considered and compared to the others. Examples from life were to be shared. In other words, Proverbs may have been written to be the basis for deep, comprehensive personal growth through mentoring in community. It touches on every area of life.

Read the whole thing

Sounds like a great idea for a small-group Bible study!