Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 91 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session finishes Proverbs and opens the Song. Dr. Essex walks the nine-and-a-half chapters that make the son ready to hear, weighs the debate over the proverbs' arrangement, and lands on the reading he has grown into: each proverb a true slice of a whole pie that is never finished. Then the Song of Songs: why the preeminent song resists the allegorical escape, and who is actually speaking. Listen for the two feasts of chapter 9, and for why the initiative of the woman unsettles the Christ-and-church reading.
The book divides four ways: the introduction (1:1 to 7); the extended wisdom discourse of 1:8 through chapter 9, which is not yet proverbs but the challenge to acquire wisdom, with ten separate calls for the son to hear; the heart of the book, chapters 10 to 29, the proverbs of Solomon and the wise, some 375 Solomonic proverbs in 10:1 to 22:16, the anonymous words of the wise in 22:17 to 24:34, and roughly eighty to ninety more Solomonic proverbs collected under Hezekiah in 25 to 29; and the final words, Agur and Lemuel in 30 and 31, closed by the free-standing acrostic on the excellent wife.
The opening discourse names the two great hurdles between the young man and wisdom: the criminal man of chapter 1, whose appeal is something for nothing, and the strange woman of chapter 2, whose appeal is pleasure without cost. Father and mother insist that both carry deadly consequences: you think it costs nothing, and you pay with your life. Essex's contemporary note: applying Proverbs today fights not only an alternative wisdom but a society that denies consequences altogether, the dastardly claim that whatever path you take, everything will be fine in the end.
The introduction states the aim: to know, intimately, intellectually and experientially, wisdom and instruction, and instruction is discipline, the reining in of waywardness, for human beings wander like a toddler loose in the house; there is no wisdom without discipline. The proverbs develop moral skill: from the learner's side, receiving instruction in righteousness, justice, and equity; from the teacher's side, giving prudence, the ability to work toward a goal, to the naive, the wide-open gullible one, and knowledge and discretion to the youth, the inexperienced one who thinks he knows more than he does. And verse 5 abolishes graduation: a wise man will hear and increase in learning; the truly wise never arrive. They also develop mental acumen: to understand a proverb and a figure, the words of the wise and their riddles, which is fair warning that the book will take everything the reader has, seeking wisdom as silver and searching as for hidden treasure, and Essex's gold-rush picture holds: a few nuggets lie in the river, but the real gold is mined deep.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: beginning as foundation and prerequisite, the point past which no progress in wisdom is possible without submission to Yahweh. Fools despise wisdom and instruction, and this word for fool means the obstinate one, hard-shelled and stuck in his ways, who will not humble himself before Yahweh, and therefore no wisdom will come. Asked how a fool becomes wise, Essex answers: he must humble himself, repent, and apply himself to the wisdom God has given, and it grows harder with age as folly hardens into habit. The world says live and learn, the school of hard knocks; Proverbs says learn and live.
The discourse climaxes in two rival banquets. Wisdom has built her house, prepared her food, mixed her wine, and calls openly: come, eat my food, forsake your folly and live. The woman of folly is boisterous at her doorway with the same invitation to the same naive passerby, but her menu is different: stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant, food she has by theft, offered in a whisper, and the section's last words before the proverbs begin tell the end of her guests: he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol. Wisdom is wide open with nothing to hide; folly hisses of a special deal. Nine and a half chapters have made the reader want the feast that leads to life; now he is ready to hear the proverbs.
Broadly, chapters 10 to 15 favor antithetical comparison and 16 onward more complementary parallelism, but is there arrangement beyond that? Position A, held by Ross in the Bible Knowledge Commentary, says the proverbs come deliberately at random: the reader is meant to supply the order, connecting this proverb with that one heard earlier, the very labor being part of the training, on which view a topical rearrangement like Dr. Mayhue's short-circuits the process. The majority position finds smaller ordered units: Proverbs 16:1 to 9, framed by an inclusio, man plans, the Lord directs, gathers nine proverbs on the Lord's governance of human plans; Goldingay has argued detailed linkage through chapters 10 to 15; and Murphy, Garrett, and Koptak all see collections, while warning that connection-hunting can invent what is not there, and liberals have emended texts to force a preconceived order. Essex declines to surrender the question: perhaps the precise order is simply not presently known, a matter, he smiles, for the millennium.
The second overarching issue is the nature of a proverb, and Essex maps his own pilgrimage across the three answers. Position A, held by most people in the pew: inflexible, absolute promises, and the pastoral flashpoint is Proverbs 22:6, claimed in prayer meetings as a guarantee that the well-trained wayward child must return. Position B, in Garrett and in Dr. Mayhue's terms: expressions of general truth, usually how life goes, but not always. Position C, Hildebrandt's, and now Essex's: each proverb is a slice of reality, true as far as it goes, needing the balance of the other slices, for if a proverb were merely generally true it would sometimes be error, and Scripture's slices are not errors but partial truths awaiting the whole. The proof texts: answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him, and, answer a fool as his folly deserves, lest he be wise in his own eyes (26:4 and 5), both true, the wise man knowing which fits the moment; and 17:27 and 28, where restrained words mark knowledge and yet even a silent fool is counted wise. Wisdom is the whole enchilada; a proverb is one slice, and the pie, like Essex's beloved Marie Callender's, is never finished, which is why interaction with Proverbs never ends.
The chief modern misuse comes not from false teachers but from sincere lovers of Proverbs: believers who latch onto a proverb as a life verse, and counselors who dispense single proverbs as absolute prescriptions, without the balancing slices, is this the moment for 26:4 or for 26:5? The discipline is to keep reading Proverbs whole, topically gathering the slices as Mayhue's book models, so that counsel reflects the balance the book itself builds in: the rod and the encouragement together in child-rearing, speech and silence each in season. Preaching follows suit: chapters 1 to 9 preach as connected discourse, and the sentence proverbs preach best topically, God's wisdom on speech, honesty, work, discipline, children; and Proverbs is tailor-made for the young, Essex's standing answer to the junior-high leader hunting a study book, though the wise man never outgrows it.
Wisdom speaks in 8:22 to 31 as the one Yahweh possessed at the beginning of his way, rejoicing before him as the world was made, and every recommended commentator reads her as what she has been since chapter 1: the personification of wisdom, the woman crying out. Her point is that wisdom has a God-given quality, God's own plan preceding creation. The New Testament will say Christ became to us wisdom, and looking back one may say so; but to read chapter 8 as direct messianic prediction in the manner of Isaiah 7:14 goes too far: it is Lady Wisdom commending her virtues, not a prophecy of the Person to come.
The closing acrostic raises its own question: since wisdom has been a woman throughout, is this Lady Wisdom once more, or a literal wife? Garrett's answer convinces: the book is addressed to a son, and the most practical wisdom-decision before him is whom to marry, so the fitting end of Proverbs is the portrait of the woman to seek: a wife of excellence whose worth is far above jewels, a hard worker, a planner, a woman of wisdom who fears the Lord, whose husband is respected in the gates and whose children rise up and bless her. The canonical order confirms the realism: in the Masoretic tradition Proverbs runs straight into Ruth, where Boaz calls Ruth by this very phrase, a woman of excellence, no unattainable ideal but a woman who lived. The chapter is written for the son, not as a checklist imposed on women, and, Essex pleads from experience at the church door, it deserves better than annual resurrection every Mother's Day.
The Hebrew title, the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, is a superlative like King of kings: the best of songs. The Vulgate's Canticum Canticorum gives the old name Canticles; the English tradition says Song of Solomon. The relative phrase could grammatically mean by Solomon, for Solomon, or in Solomon's style, and Essex takes the classic reading: by Solomon, the man of 1 Kings 4 who spoke three thousand proverbs and wrote a thousand and five songs; of all his songs, this was the greatest, the finest hit, as Essex puts it, of the hit parade of 970 to 931 BC.
Once Solomon is the author, interpreters face the obvious difficulty: how could the man whose own marital life was such a disaster pen this poem of human love? The historic majority answered by removing the human love: Jewish commentators read God's love for Israel, Christian commentators Christ's love for the church. But the allegory stumbles on a stubborn feature of the text: the majority of the Song's words belong to the woman, and she takes the initiative from the first line, may he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth; draw me after you; the king has brought me into his chambers. Essex asks, with a smile, what the church initiating toward Christ does to one's Calvinistic theology; and adds the earthy observation, confirmed by every marriage survey, that it is generally the wife who craves the words of love more, exactly as the Song depicts.
If the Song is history and not allegory, whose history? The readings multiply: the Shulammite as Solomon's first love, the interpretation most popular in twentieth-century evangelicalism; a later reflection on a lost love; or the shepherd hypothesis, three characters, in which Solomon woos a woman of his court who remains true to her shepherd lover, and the king learns what true love is by watching a devotion he cannot buy. The interpretive decision cannot be dodged by the preacher, and the book is genuinely difficult. Canonically the placement teaches: in the Masoretic order the Song follows Ruth, where Torah-shaped wisdom produced a godly marriage, and the Song then answers the next question, what should the response of husband and wife within the godly marriage be?; while in the festival order the Song stands first among the scrolls, sung at Passover, where the classic mind connected the covenant love established at the exodus with the Song's love.
Modern translations assign the lines: bride, bridegroom, chorus. The reader must know these labels are interpretation, absent from the Hebrew; the NASB honestly sets them in the margin, while versions that print them inside the text, as the NIV does, leave the average reader supposing the Hebrew itself says so. The workable clues are the terms of address: the man calls the woman my darling, better, my companion, my cherished one, and most beautiful among women; the woman calls the man my beloved; the daughters of Jerusalem, named four times, form the responding chorus; a king appears, and Solomon by name, his curtains, his couch ringed by sixty mighty men, his sedan chair of Lebanon timber; a shepherd appears three times, pasturing his flock; and through it all runs the imagery of the garden and of wine, the joy shared between the man and the woman. The purpose, stated plainly before the interpretive battles begin: the Song celebrates the marital joy experienced by the man and the woman.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-two are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What occupies Proverbs 1:8 through chapter 9?
2. What are the appeals of the criminal man and the strange woman?
3. Why can there be no wisdom without instruction, that is, discipline?
4. What does Proverbs 1:5 abolish?
5. What does beginning mean in the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge?
6. What distinguishes Folly's banquet from Wisdom's in chapter 9?
7. What does position A claim about the arrangement of chapters 10 to 29?
8. What does Proverbs 16:1 to 9 demonstrate for the majority position?
9. How do most people in the pew read a proverb like 22:6?
10. Why does Essex prefer slice of reality to expression of general truth?
11. What do Proverbs 26:4 and 5 require of the wise man?
12. Where does the chief modern misuse of Proverbs arise, per Essex?
13. How should the sentence proverbs generally be preached?
14. Why is Proverbs 8:22 to 31 not a direct messianic prophecy?
15. How does Garrett settle the identity of the woman of Proverbs 31?
16. What does the canonical seam from Proverbs into Ruth confirm?
17. What does the title Song of Songs mean?
18. How did the historic majority resolve the problem of Solomon's authorship?
19. What textual feature most troubles the allegorical reading?
20. What is the shepherd hypothesis?
21. What should readers know about the speaker labels in modern translations of the Song?
22. What is the Song's purpose, stated before the interpretive debates?
All twenty-two correct. Lecture 25 is complete.
Proverbs says the world's two great lies are something for nothing and pleasure without cost, in an age that denies consequences altogether. Where do you hear those two appeals most persuasively pitched today?
The fear of the Lord is wisdom's prerequisite: no submission, no progress. Where are you seeking skill, in work, relationships, or ministry, without first submitting that area to God?
Essex moved from reading proverbs as promises, to general truths, to slices of a whole. Which proverb have you treated as the whole pie, and which balancing slices does it need?
Both feasts of Proverbs 9 invite the same simple passerby. What makes stolen water taste sweet, and what would help you crave the open table instead?
The Song gives most of its words to the woman and celebrates married joy without embarrassment. What does it say about God that such a book is Scripture, and what corrections does it offer to both prudishness and the culture's version of love?
Proverbs 1:7
Read Proverbs 1 to 9 in one or two sittings, marking each call to hear and the two banquets of chapter 9, then Proverbs 26:1 to 12 to watch the slices balance each other. Read Proverbs 31:10 to 31 beside Ruth 3, and the Song of Songs chapter 1 noting who speaks. Next session: the interpretation of the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes.