The Epistemology of the Book of Proverbs

(ProQuest: ... denotes Greek characters omitted (or Cyrillic characters omitted.)) Although knowledge (also called "wisdom" and "understanding"1) is at the center of Proverbs' concern, little is said about how knowledge is created, where it comes from, and how truths-claims are verified.2 Still, there must have been an implicit epistemology-ideas about what knowledge is and what its sources are. Some propositions were considered true and others false, and the authors of Proverbs believed that they had the means to distinguish them. That is to say, they had an epistemology, albeit unreflective and unsystematic. The present essay tries to describe its main lines. I. EMPIRICISM? Before addressing the question of what wisdom epistemology is, it is important to determine what it is not. Contrary to the scholarly consensus, it is not empiricism, the philosophical principle that all knowledge ultimately derives from sensory experience. Scholars have considered wisdom to be empirical because the sayings are largely about daily life and thus presumably based on the experiences of daily life, and because they seem to reflect Erlebnisweisheit, the wisdom of experience. Moreover, since the sages never invoke divine revelation or a tradition claiming to derive from it, it might seem that only observation was available as the source of knowledge. Wisdom empiricism is understood to mean that the sages gained and validated their knowledge by looking at the world, observing what was beneficial and harmful, and casting their observations in the form of proverbs and epigrams. Some sayings do seem to be based on experience. Assertions such as "Hatred stirs up conflict, while love covers up all transgressions" (Prov 10:12) seem like commonsense observations of people dealing with one another. The teachings about the danger of the king's wrath and the prudence of appeasing it (14:35; 16:14; 19:12; 20:2) sound like something a royal official could have learned firsthand, the hard way. The warning against providing surety (Prov 6:1-5; 11:15; 17:18; 20:16; 22:26; 27:13) is probably a lesson of experience, because it teaches a strictly prudential, not moral, principle. Still, empiricism is not the epistemological foundation of wisdom. The experiences from which some teachings derive belong to the authors' biographies, to a stage before epistemological standards decide just what is true. Experience, as Gerhard von Rad emphasizes, is not an immediate source of wisdom. Experiences themselves are created. To be sure, experiential knowledge (Erfahrungswissen) is constructed from experiences, "[a]ber voraussetzungslose Erfahrungen gibt es ja nicht. Der Mensch macht weithin the Erfahrungen, the er erwartet und auf the er auf Grund der Vorstellungen, the er sich von seiner Umwelt gemacht hat, gerustet ist."3 Experience does not translate directly into wisdom. An observation must meet some other test first. Consider the saying in Ezek 18:2 (called a ..., like the sayings in Proverbs): "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth stand on edge." This conforms to the experience of the people who are using it, namely, the Jerusalemites, who are still reeling from the disaster of 597 B.C.E. Moreover, it conforms to the observable fact that some-or much-parental behavior harms the children, sometimes disastrously. Yet it is doubtful that this proverb would have qualified as wisdom by Proverbs' standards. Proverbs insists on individual responsibility for one's fate, and the idea of punishment transferred between generations is contrary to the sapiential view of individual retribution.4 In distinction, Prov 10:12 (cited above) is wise not so much because it is empirically based as because it warns against a social evil and affirms the accepted virtues of love and concord. In any case, empiricism is irrelevant to most of Proverbs. It is inconceivable that proverbs such as the following were extracted from experiential data: The Lord will not let a righteous man starve, but he rebuffs the desire of evildoers. …