What Is the Fear of the Lord?

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” The line comes from the first chapter of Proverbs, and it is strange and confusing. What does it mean? Solomon himself frames it as a riddle. Let me show you.

Proverbs Are Riddles

Proverbs opens with “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.” Then come 28 words, four times seven, describing what the proverbs will do. They will give us wisdom and knowledge, and make us able to give them to others: justice, words of insight, and more.

The last thing we are told is that the proverbs are “to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles” (1:6). That is a strange claim. The proverbs help us understand riddles, and the proverbs themselves are riddles. To become wise and gain knowledge, we have to work our way through them.

And in the very next verse, Solomon hands us the first riddle:

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.
(Proverbs 1:7)

Why It’s a Riddle

There are three reasons to call this a riddle.

First, people find it confusing. “I thought fear wasn’t a good thing. Doesn’t the New Testament say that perfect love casts out fear?”

Second, it isn’t clear where Solomon got the idea. He tells us this is the beginning, the foundation, the first place we must go to get wisdom. Yet it isn’t quite where we would expect to find it. It isn’t among the commands of Genesis 1–3: be fruitful and multiply, subdue the earth, rule over it. The Law commands Israel to fear God, but it never calls that fear the beginning of knowledge, the foundation of wisdom. And though Proverbs has many parallels with Egyptian wisdom, especially in its middle chapters, it doesn’t come from there either.

So how does Solomon know it? It could be direct divine revelation; that is always possible. But Proverbs is more practical. Its revelation is learned through experience and reflection. That is part of what makes this saying a riddle: for such a foundational principle, its source is surprisingly hard to find.

Third, it isn’t clear in what sense fear is the beginning of knowledge. It isn’t all of knowledge, but somehow it stands at the base, as the first step in acquiring it. Why?

Let’s try to untangle two questions: What does it mean? And where did Solomon get the idea?

What Does It Mean?

Many commentators define the fear of the Lord as something like “reverent awe,” and they often want to remove anything resembling ordinary fear from the definition.

Reverence and awe are certainly part of it, but I don’t think they are the whole of it, and I don’t think we should strip out the fear. Elsewhere in the Bible the word does carry the sense of fear. And Hebrew has other words for reverence and honor that Solomon could have used, but didn’t. So I’m inclined to think fear really is part of it.

Other texts give us a hint. Some passages tell us to fear; others tell us not to. Angels appear and say, “Do not fear,” while elsewhere we are told to fear God. And in at least one verse we find both at once:

Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you.”
(Exodus 20:20)

This verse teaches something we already know by instinct: there are two fundamentally different kinds of fear.

Imagine an intruder breaks into your house with a gun. You are afraid, and that fear makes you want to get away. It repels you from the thing you fear.

Now imagine you are skydiving. You are sitting in the plane, the door opens, and it’s time to jump. You are afraid here too, with the same sense of being pushed away. But this time there is something else: a desire that pulls you toward the thing you fear. And that desire is strong enough to carry you through the fear and out the door.

That second kind of fear is what I believe Proverbs means. That is the fear we need.

Why Fear Is the Beginning of Wisdom

But what does fear have to do with acquiring wisdom and knowledge? Why is it the foundation?

Think of gaining wisdom as solving a riddle. Solomon tells us that the proverbs are riddles we must work out to become wise, because life itself is a riddle. Every day brings situations that are puzzles waiting to be solved.

What is a riddle like? It is difficult. There is something in it that repels us, a Gordian knot at the center, whether it’s with your sister, your mother, or a colleague at work. You think, “If I do this, something bad happens. If I do that, something bad could happen too.” Part of you is repelled, and sometimes you decide to do nothing at all.

Wisdom and knowledge mean untangling that knot. Something repels you, but you also need something that draws you in: to pay attention, to love in that situation, to act wisely and work it out.

The fear of the Lord, our relationship with God, has exactly this structure, and it is the structure of all of life. Something about God drives us back. He is a consuming fire, and there are legitimately fearful things about him. Yet we are meant to draw near to him. We have to move through that fear to reach him and to gain wisdom, because he is wisdom.

So the fear of the Lord shares the basic structure of everything else in life. If we learn to do this with God, we will be able to do it everywhere else.

The book’s structure reflects this too. The word fear appears 14 times in Proverbs, two times seven. Its last occurrence falls right in the middle of the book, and then it never appears again. Fear is the foundation that carries us to the middle of the book, and from there we keep building the structure of wisdom.

Where Did Solomon Get the Idea?

That leaves our last question. Where did Solomon get this idea? What clues do we have?

When we trace how fear is used, something fascinating emerges. It appears at crucial testing moments in the lives of four key figures in the Old Testament:

• Adam, after the Fall
• Abraham, after the test of sacrificing Isaac (Genesis 22)
• Moses, after he comes down from Sinai with the Ten Commandments (the verse about testing we read above)
• David, in his last words at the end of his life

Abraham

After Abraham shows he is willing to sacrifice Isaac, God says to him, “Now I know that you fear God” (Genesis 22:12). Abraham is the first person said to fear God, and it comes right after this crucial test, this riddle.

Why is it a riddle? God commanded humanity to be fruitful and multiply. He finally gave Abraham a son, and now he tells him to sacrifice that son. It is confusing; it seems to make no sense. But Abraham untangles the riddle, and the fear of the Lord is what lets him do it.

Moses

Moses also faces a riddle. Early in his life he sees the burning bush and turns aside to see why the bush is not consumed. That bush later becomes an image of God coming down to dwell with his people as a consuming fire. Then God calls Moses up the mountain. It is all very confusing.

Once Moses has passed through this test, the fear of the Lord appears, and it is what Moses has come to understand. Recall what he tells the people: “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you.” Like Abraham, they face a test. When they pass it, working through the riddle Moses has already solved, they show that they have the fear of the Lord.

David

David, by the end of his life, had been through many tests. The last chapters of 2 Samuel give us his song and then his last words. The song is introduced like this:

And David spoke to the Lord the words of this song on the day when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand of Saul.
(2 Samuel 22:1)

Those were his tests. Then come his last words:

The Spirit of the Lord speaks by me;
his word is on my tongue.
The God of Israel has spoken;
the Rock of Israel has said to me:
When one rules justly over men,
ruling in the fear of God…
(2 Samuel 23:2–3)

Looking back over a life of tests and trials, the first thing David says is that a just ruler must rule in the fear of God.

Here is what makes this especially striking. The first seven verses of Proverbs, the ones summarized at the start, are arranged as a chiasm, with the virtues wisdom produces at the center. And the central virtue is justice, exactly what David says the fear of God makes possible.

Adam

Finally, we come to the first mention of fear in the Bible. After the Fall, God comes looking for Adam:

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”
(Genesis 3:9–10)

This seems like a strange place to begin. How could Solomon draw “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” from a fear that drove Adam away from God?

Notice a few things. This is the first thing we are ever told about Adam’s inner life, and it is fear. But we have seen that there are two kinds of fear: one that drives us away and one that draws us toward. Adam has the kind that drives away. That double nature of fear is itself a riddle, the first riddle inside the human heart.

Adam needed to fear, but in the right way. He needed to work out this riddle. It is like Proverbs 26:4–5, which tells us both to answer a fool and not to answer a fool. It takes wisdom to know which one the moment calls for. In the same way, Adam needed to learn how to fear rightly.

This parallels the sin in the garden. Adam and Eve were not to eat from the tree of knowledge yet. Not never, just not yet. Once they had grown wise enough, they would have been allowed that knowledge. Instead they took it at the wrong time and in the wrong way.

That they might someday have eaten from the tree may be a new idea, so let me briefly explain. The closest parallel to the phrase “good and evil” is Solomon’s prayer in 1 Kings 3, where he asks for “an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil” (3:9). And God grants it. Solomon receives the knowledge of good and evil.

So just as knowledge was misused in the beginning, so was fear. Had Adam feared God rightly, he would in time have gained knowledge rightly. By the time we reach Proverbs, the moment has come to fear God and so gain wisdom the right way.

It is no surprise, then, that outside Genesis 2–3 the tree of life appears in the Old Testament only in Proverbs (3:18; 11:30; 13:12; 15:4). Now that we fear God rightly and gain knowledge rightly, we are back in Eden, eating from the tree of life.

Proverbs 1 also alludes to Genesis 3. Both passages are about gaining knowledge and wisdom. And though it doesn’t come through in English, Proverbs 1:3 uses the same verb for “to receive instruction in wise dealing” that Genesis uses when Eve took the fruit. Then, knowledge was taken. Here, it is received in fear.

Wisdom Found in Lives

One more thing. Notice how Solomon learned about fear. The Law commands Israel to fear God, but it never calls that fear the beginning of knowledge, the foundation of wisdom. So where did Solomon get that idea?

He studied wise men and foolish men. He looked at foolish Adam, and at wise Abraham, Moses, and David. He watched their actions and examined their lives. He worked out the riddle of those lives by asking: What lay at the foundation that let Abraham sacrifice his only son, let Moses climb a mountain to meet a God of fire, and let David battle all his enemies? And what drove Adam away?

Looking through the riddle of those lives, he saw the answer: the fear of the Lord. And that makes sense, because wisdom is the skill of living. It isn’t thinking alone; it is thinking in action. So it fits that Solomon found the idea by studying people and the lives they led. That is where wisdom is found.

And that, my friends, is why the Bible is art.

Thank you to the commenter on an earlier version of this video who pointed out that I had missed the first mention of fear in the Bible, in Genesis 3. I reworked the video because of it, and it made the thesis much stronger.