What Is a Proverb? (It's Not What You Think)

If you have ever thought the proverbs were simple, obvious pieces of moral wisdom, what follows will change the way you read them.

That was me for 32 years. I thought the proverbs were simple, obvious moral truths: important, but not very profound. I wasn’t alone, either. A surprising number of scholars say the same thing. But what I have learned is that the proverbs are actually the exact opposite. Let me explain what I mean, after we try an experiment.

An Experiment

Let’s suppose the proverbs really are simple moral truths. If they are, we should be able to fill them in. I’ll read the first line of a proverb, and you supply the second. If they are as obvious as we think, it should be easy.

Open to Proverbs 10 and start with verse 6:

Blessings are on the head of the righteous…

Stop there. What is the obvious conclusion? Something like, “but curses are on the head of the wicked.” Right?

Wrong. Here is the actual proverb:

Blessings are on the head of the righteous,
but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.
(Proverbs 10:6)

That was not expected. It isn’t the obvious opposite of the first line at all.

Maybe that one is just odd. Let’s go two verses down, to 10:8:

The wise of heart will receive commandments…

What are we expecting? Surely, “but the foolish of heart will not receive commandments.” Or, if you suspect a trick, “but the foolish of heart will reject commandments.”

Wrong again:

The wise of heart will receive commandments,
but a babbling fool will come to ruin.
(Proverbs 10:8)

Written to Be Difficult

Solomon wrote the proverbs to be unexpected. He could have written the obvious opposite of the first line, but he didn’t, and our job is to understand why.

Here is the genius of it. Solomon wrote the proverbs to be difficult. He made them opaque so that we would have to work to get to the bottom of them. The proverbs are two-line gems: moral, social, psychological and theological statements, joined together in unexpected ways. The second line isn’t what we expect, and the whole point is that we would puzzle over it, and in puzzling, become wise.

Imagine someone gave you this assignment: “Write something that teaches wisdom. But don’t just hand over the content of wisdom. Write it so that readers become wise while they are reading.” I wouldn’t even know where to start. Yet that is precisely what Solomon has done.

By making the second line opaque and difficult, he makes us puzzle. He slows us down, so that we have to work it through. Solomon takes two statements about reality, whether about society, speech, or the world, and puts them side by side. In doing so he is saying, “There is a connection between these two things that you didn’t know existed. It does exist, and you have to figure out how.”

Two Lines, One Proverb

A proverb is one thing with two lines. We sometimes think we have understood a proverb once we understand what the first line means and what the second line means. But that is only the first step. It is like learning the alphabet and thinking you know how to read. You understand a proverb when you understand how the two lines are one: how these seemingly unrelated moral realities relate to each other. A proverb gives us a moral anatomy, a moral architecture.

It is a bit like Einstein’s great discovery, E = mc². Einstein didn’t discover a new object or a new element. He discovered the relationship between things we had known about for a long time, energy, mass and the speed of light, but had never understood how they were connected.

Or take a common design exercise. You are given a color and a shape, or a color and a typeface, and you have to make a good design out of them. At first you might think the shape and the color don’t go together at all. But they do; you just need the skill to see how. You might be handed a spatula and the color yellow, or a smile, and asked to make them work together.

Working Through a Proverb

Let me show you how this works with the last proverb we read:

The wise of heart will receive commandments,
but a babbling fool will come to ruin.

How do these two lines relate?

Whenever Solomon gives a proverb, the obvious thing we would expect is no doubt true. Solomon presupposes it. He doesn’t spell out the obvious opposite, because he knows we can work that out ourselves. He wants to deepen our knowledge of the structure of the moral and social world.

So in the second line he gives us the moral opposite of the wise of heart, and it isn’t simply a fool who doesn’t receive commandments. That is no doubt true, and we all know it. But there is something deeper we may have missed. Some people miss social cues; their social and moral intelligence isn’t working properly. Solomon wants to sharpen our perception, and he does it by drawing out this interesting relationship: the wise of heart is set against the babbling fool.

Notice what he has done. In the second line, the fool literally has no heart. Why? Because in essence he doesn’t have one. In Hebrew, the heart is the organ of thinking and feeling, the center of a person’s consciousness. Solomon has left it out, and he has replaced it not with another organ, like a mouth, but simply with an action: babbling.

When you close yourself off and can no longer receive commandments and instruction, you substitute something else for it: an extraordinary amount of activity, constant talking.

And where does that lead? To ruin. Why ruin? The opposite of ruin is building up, and you cannot build up yourself, your moral and social world, unless you receive instruction and commandment. But the fool doesn’t receive. He is always talking. He has no organ of thinking and feeling; he is just running his mouth. Like a construction crew with no plans, he can’t build anything, and he comes to ruin.

That is the deeper reality Solomon wants to work into us, by making us draw these new connections.

Try It Yourself

So the next time you read a proverb, cover the second line. Read the first line and ask yourself what you expect to come next. Then uncover the second line, and get to the hard work of understanding why Solomon didn’t write what you expected.