Wine Is a Mocker

This week we’re looking at the art of Proverbs 20:1:

Wine is a mocker, strong drink a brawler,
and whoever is led astray by it is not wise.
(Proverbs 20:1)

If you haven’t yet, you may want to start with my pieces on the structure of Proverbs and how to understand a proverb. But if you’re ready, let’s go.

Who Is Mocking Whom?

The author says that wine is a mocker. But that could mean three different things.

1. Wine mocks you, the drinker. It mocks you because you can’t handle it; it overtakes you.
2. Wine makes you mock others.
3. Wine makes others mock you, because of your drunkenness.

The same three options apply to the second phrase, “strong drink a brawler.” Did I fight someone? Did they fight me? Did the drink fight against me?

Or perhaps we don’t know, because that is what drunkenness is like. When you’re drunk, you don’t know and you don’t remember. Was I mocking someone at the party, or were they mocking me? Did I get into a fight?

The ambiguity in the wording mirrors the ambiguity that comes with drinking.

When the Drink Leads

There is another puzzle. How can a drink mock or fight? It is an inanimate object. People mock and fight; objects don’t.

We could call it personification, and that is certainly part of it. But I think something else is going on.

The final line says that drink “leads astray.” It is ridiculous and backwards for a drink to lead, mock, and fight instead of a man. Drunkenness inverts the proper order: the master becomes the servant.

Think of the confession made in Alcoholics Anonymous. You have to admit your powerlessness, that alcohol has power over you.

One 17th-century pastor said this of drunkenness:

It disguiseth a person, it doth even unman him. Drunkenness gives him the throat of a fish, and the belly of a swine, and the heart of an ass. Drunkenness is the shame of nature, the extinguisher of reason, the shipwreck of chastity, and the murder of conscience.

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