Lecture 23: What Is Wisdom? The Skill of Living, the Sage, and Meeting Job

The lecture, section by section

1. Hokmah: skill by design

   The Hebrew word for wisdom carries the idea of skill: skill in technical work, skill in administering a state, an ability given in creation and at times given specially by God, as to Joseph, David, Solomon, and Daniel. It rests on understanding how God has made the world and how God has made people, so that the person of hokmah can devise a plan that works with the grain of the created order. The working definition: wisdom is the skill of being able to form and execute a correct plan to gain the desired results, to get from A to B because one understands what one is working with. And ultimately, as Proverbs 8 will show, wisdom goes back to God himself, who designed his plan before he created: all wisdom comes from the Designer.

2. Wisdom is life, and it is moral

   Because wisdom is alignment with God's design, it is a source of life, and to live against it is death: ignore the law of gravity and step off the roof, and you do not break God's design, it breaks you. The wisdom literature insists the same holds in the moral realm, for the God who built gravity into creation built moral order into it too: steal and you will be stolen from, deceive and you will be deceived, do unto others and they will do unto you, the very creative ordinance the course met when God judged the nations by their own dealings. And wisdom is available to all who will hear: she cries aloud in the streets to the simple, the fool, and the scoffer. Wisdom is open, honest, and public; it is foolishness that is secretive, suspicious, and sly, whispering, I have a special deal for you and you alone.

3. The sage beside priest and prophet

   Israel knew three continuing voices: the priest who taught Torah, the prophet who spoke the oracles, and the sage, the counselor with penetrating discernment into the ways of the world, a triad Jeremiah's enemies confirm when they plot, the law will not perish from the priest, nor counsel from the wise, nor the word from the prophet (Jeremiah 18:18). The wise were prized beyond Israel too: Joseph in Egypt and Daniel in Babylon were each recognized as having the wisdom of the gods in them and were installed where their skill served the state. And as priest and prophet anticipate the ultimate Priest and Prophet, so the sage anticipates the ultimate Sage: Israel's wisest man was Solomon, and Jesus declared, something greater than Solomon is here (Matthew 12:42).

4. Three types of wisdom literature

   The Old Testament's wisdom comes in three forms. First, the proverbial statement: the pithy, memorable couplet, usually in antithetical parallelism because its business is the contrast of the wise and the fool, the heart of the book of Proverbs. Second, the longer moral exhortation: because even the young are rebellious enough to need urging toward wisdom, the first eight and a half chapters of Proverbs are extended appeal, my son, hear my words. Third, the extended wisdom discourse: Job and Ecclesiastes, where the wisdom is the whole book. One cannot lift a verse from Job the way one lifts a proverb; the design is that only when the entire discourse has been read, beginning to end, has it delivered its nugget of how to live skillfully.

5. Books that will not exhaust

   A frank word from the lectern: once the wisdom literature gets under your skin it never leaves, because it is designed to engage, challenge, and stretch discernment, and by its very nature it does not dispense its wisdom on the first reading, or the second. Essex tells his students plainly: you are not yet wise, and adds that on his own hundred-and-second reading he keeps finding nuggets he had not perceived. No books of Scripture are more challenging than Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes. Alongside the three major books stand the wisdom psalms, Psalms 1, 19, 37, and 119, and the vocabulary confirms the map: the Hebrew wisdom root clusters overwhelmingly in Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, with a further presence in the Psalms.

6. The characteristics of wisdom

   Four marks describe the literature. It addresses the individual: my son in Proverbs, the Preacher's hearer in Ecclesiastes, and in Job the reader watching one man's ordeal. Its authority is moral experience and trained intelligence. Its concern is the workaday world. And its method is counsel and instruction: where the prophetic word confronts, thus says the Lord, the word of the wise exhorts, softer in manner and just as powerful in the end.

7. The Torah says sin; wisdom says stupid

   The two voices teach the same standard from two sides. Torah says, you shall not commit adultery: that is Yahweh's standard, and the adulterer will answer to Yahweh. Proverbs 5 and 7 say: you want to be an adulterer? That is the most stupid thing you can do; give in to the seductress and you will pay the price the rest of your life; here is better counsel: enjoy your wife. Both are true of every sin, stealing, lying, deceit alike: sin is an offense to God, and sin is a stupid action with devastating consequences in this life. Essex's own discipline under temptation is to remember both: I will answer to God for this, and, Keith, this is stupid. The double word matters especially for the young, to whom the wisdom literature is chiefly addressed, for whom standing before God feels far away; sometimes they most need to hear that the contemplated act is simply foolish, the biblical original of the frying-pan advertisement, while Ecclesiastes still lands the deeper word: fear God and keep his commandments.

8. From the Psalms to Job

   In the Jewish canon Job follows the Psalms, an order more insightful than the English arrangement that reverses it. The Psalms introduced the righteous man, the man of Torah living among the wicked until the kingdom comes, whose enemies are God's enemies. Job introduces the righteous man again, the most righteous man of his generation, and discloses that his adversity comes not only from wicked men but from a spiritual enemy as well: the God-fearing man faces adversity that is, humanly speaking, beyond comprehension.

9. Job the man, attested

   The book is named for its main character, mentioned fifty-four times; its essence is what happens in Job's life and his interaction with four men and finally with Yahweh. Scripture itself attests him: Ezekiel names Job twice among the righteous, and James 5 holds him up as the paradigm of endurance under trial, you have heard of the endurance of Job and have seen the outcome of the Lord's dealings, that the Lord is full of compassion. James's audience, like many sufferers, had begun to speak as if their trials proved God ill-disposed; James 1 answers that God gives good gifts to his children, and Job, rightly read, ends in exactly that vindication.

10. History, not fable

    Dating the book requires two questions: when did the events occur, and when was the book composed? On the first, the decisive observation is the frame: Job begins and ends in historical narrative, and no Hebrew audience hearing that narrative style, the same style that carries historical events everywhere else in the canon, would have taken it as anything but the record of a real man's real experiences, a judgment sealed by Ezekiel's and James's citations of Job as an actual person.

11. The land of Uz

    Job 1:1 places him in the land of Uz, and Scripture supplies the connection: Genesis 22:20 and 21 report to Abraham that Milcah has borne children to his brother Nahor, Uz the firstborn, with Buz among his brothers. As often in Genesis, a progenitor's name attaches to the land his descendants settle, so Job's country traces to Abraham's wider family, the patriarchal world in which the book's opening scenes so evidently move. The session breaks off here, with the setting established and the book's interpretive questions ahead.

1. Wisdom is defined as skill in living with the grain of God's design. Where in your life are you currently living against the grain, and what would working with it look like?

2. Foolishness whispers a special deal for you alone; wisdom cries out in the street to everyone. Where have you seen the secretive, flattering appeal of folly at work, and what made it attractive?

3. Sin is both an offense to God and a stupid act with earthly consequences. Which of the two motives actually restrains you more, and what does that reveal about your view of God?

4. Essex tells seminarians, you are not yet wise, and says the wisdom books keep yielding on the hundred-and-second reading. How do you respond to teaching that refuses to give itself up quickly, and what habits would let these books get under your skin?

5. The Psalms' righteous man had wicked enemies; Job's righteousness drew a spiritual enemy. How does knowing that adversity can come upon the godly precisely because they are godly change how you interpret suffering?