It is hard rewarding work to dig into a verse or couplet from the Book of Proverbs to understand and apply it. I am amazed that the wisdom of the Proverbs about life and people have remained relevant and applicable over thousands of years. After you have read and digested a verse, do you ever move on to the next one and feel befuddled about the sequence of the verses in the Book of Proverbs? If you are at all like me, when you read the next verse, it often seems unrelated, or at best tangential. I find myself wondering about the thought process and inspiration of the author. My personal gift, which I have used as a physicist and now as a theologian, has always been to be able to organize, analyze and comprehend complex data, so deep down, I find the Book of Proverbs to be disturbing because I am reading God’s word and only seeing a jumble of valuable, but unorganized thoughts. Up until now, I have been unable to crack the Proverbs code. I want to share insight provided by the Jewish Book of Legends, the Sefer Ha Aggadah, which provides a novel, rabbinical interpretive framework to understand the writings of Solomon in the book of Proverbs.
The idea is illustrated by a series of parables:[1]
The Torah is a great palace where everyone got lost in the many hallways. So a clever man took a coil of reed grass (rope) and tied it at the entrance – everyone used the coil to go in and out. “Solomon did this for the Torah so everyone could understand it.”
The Torah is a reed thicket so dense no man dared enter lest they get lost. A clever man took a sickle and cut a path so everyone entered and left the same way. “So was the way of Solomon with the Torah.”
The Torah is a large basket of fruit or a cauldron filled with boiling water – a clever man built handles so it could be moved. “So was Solomon – the Torah could not properly be grasped, but after Solomon everyone could grasp it.”
The Torah is a deep well – but no one could get a drink until a man tied rope to rope, cord to cord and drew water to drink. Then everyone could use the rope to drink. “Solomon proceeding from one word to another, from one parable to another penetrated the hidden meaning of the Torah.”
The point is that the Jewish Rabbis understood the writings of Solomon, the longest and most substantial of which is the Book of Proverbs, as Solomon’s commentary on the first five books of the Bible, the Torah! In contrast, many Christians think of the Proverbs as a valuable, but odd assortment of independent wisdom couplets. Without the Proverbs to guide the Jewish rabbis, these rabbinical authorities felt that the Torah was impossible to comprehend.
This was a breathtaking revelation for me.
I have never even thought to try to align the Proverbs with the Torah to gain a deeper understanding of its moral lessons. These rabbis argue that without this guide, we have no chance of grasping the content of the Torah. For those of you, who, like me, had never heard of this idea, I hope you will enjoy exploring the Proverbs again, with new eyes, seeing new connections and asking new different questions.
Much work needs to be done to explore this idea and find the correspondence between the Torah and the Proverbs, but I suspect there is also much to be gained.
[1] For brevity I have summarized these parables, which can be read in full here: Book of Legends Sefer Ha Aggadah, Legends of the Talmud and Midrash, H. Bialik, Y Ravnitzky, , pg 3, #3.
Atheist to Elder 
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