The Embarrassing Problem About Proverbs

I never thought of Proverbs as challenging our concepts of what it means to be "advanced," especially in our society. However, it makes sense. Those who are most bored by "truisms" are those who often are trying to cut corners somehow. Of course, I might be a bit biased on this subject because I absolutely love old sayings and Proverbs is chock full of them.

Let us begin with the embarrassing problem about this book (Proverbs). Almost always, the more intelligent, clever, and original you are, the more bored you are by Proverbs. It tells you nothing you didn't know before. It is a book of platitudes, of old, well-worn truisms. It is, simply, dull.

Yes, that is how the most "advanced" minds see Proverbs. And our nation, our civilization, and our world are today threatened with destruction precisely because of the ideas of those "advanced" minds, because we have departed from the old platitudes. If there is anything out civilization needs in order to survive the threat of moral and spiritual and perhaps physical destruction, it is to return to these "safe," "dull" platitudes. For they are true. They are a road map to life, and we are lost in the woods. ...

Like the Psalms, Proverbs is not meant to be read straight through as if it were a narrative. The book is a toolbench, a library: it is meant to be sampled, browsed through, picked at. It is a collection, assembled bit by bit and meant to be disassembled and used bit by bit. In our age of short attention spans, impatience, and only tiny slices of leisure time, it is an ideal book to dip into for a minute over your morning cup of coffee -- much more useful than the morning paper. As Henry David Thoreau, who despised newspapers, used to say, "Read not the Times; read the eternities." These are the eternities.

You Can Understand the Bible
A Practical And Illuminating Guide To Each Book In The Bible
by Peter Kreeft