How metaphor theory can help you read the weirdest book in the bible
Proverbs are metaphors too :)
A little sleep, a little slumber,
a little folding of the hands to rest—
and poverty will come on you like a thief
and scarcity like an armed man.
-Prov 6:10–11
Apparently, the bible says that if you sleep, poverty will attack you.
^^ That’s the setup. Here’s the thesis: Proverbs is one of the most misinterpreted books in the Canon. And the problem lies in how we conceptualize the genre.
The last few weeks I’ve been writing about cognitive metaphor theory, metaphor and divine language, and poetry that breaks the rules of metaphor. I promise I’ll stop talking about metaphor soon, but not yet.
Proverbs are such an interesting case study for metaphor theory. Before I explain my take on how to read proverbs, and biblical Proverbs in particular. It’s worth pointing out how bad we are at this (if the above example didn’t take).
Here’s another one (Prov 10:1): “A wise son makes a father glad, and a foolish son is the sorrow of his mother.” Does this mean that if your parents are sad, you’re a fool? What if your parents are fools? Is it still “wisdom” to do whatever would make them happy?
Last example, Prov 26:4
Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you yourself will be just like him.
Ok, so don’t answer fools according to their folly. Got it.
But then Prov 26:5 (the very next verse) says,
Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.
You see the point? Reading proverbs as though they were promises or spells or commands or blanket truisms will lead you to contradiction land, or other weird places.
Because proverbs aren’t always true. They aren’t supposed to be. That’s because they are metaphors :)
Well, they are half of a metaphor.
Proverbs are the “source domain” of a metaphor:1 the part of the metaphor you use to describe the other thing. In the classic example, “I am the good shepherd.” Jesus is the “target domain,” the part that the metaphor describes, and “good shepherd” is the “source domain,” the concept used to describe Jesus. And I’m saying that proverbs are the “source domain” for an undefined target. (That’s the tidbit.)
That means that proverbs are little images/concepts that apply to some things, people, events, and occurrences. Knowing when and to what they apply requires wisdom. More on that at the end.
Related sidenote:
Did you know that the bible’s collection of proverbs overlaps with a collection archaeologists found in Egypt?2 I think that’s pretty cool. One implication is that it validates the premise that becoming a better reader of scripture and becoming a better reader are related.
Often, the readings presented by those who “take the Bible literally” (which typically means “literalistically”) are just... bad reading. I’m all for “literal” readings of scripture, as long as we mean readings that attend to literary features of the text—readings that treat the bible as what it is: ancient literature.
So, here’s a little game for you (I promise it’s more fun than it might sound!). I’ve collected a list of non-bible proverbs.3 Try to imagine a target domain for them. Try to come up with a scenario where these are fitting metaphors. I think you’ll find that it’s pretty easy/intuitive. Probably the reason your brain does it so easily is that these proverbs follow The Maxim of Quantity™️, which I discussed last week. But you don’t need to understand that to have an absolute blast deciphering these proverbs :)4
As usual, I’m going to preface these by saying you should try to pay attention to what your brain does as you decipher them. I think it’s pretty cool that this works. At their best, proverbs are sparse but dense. Their density is cool to me because it means trusting the reader to intuit the right things (and not the wrong things). Often, proverbs won’t translate across cultures because they rely on so much implicit background.
So, I’d bet you can “understand”5 most of these automatically. Give it a try:
Blind blames the ditch
Big thunder, little rain
Jelly in a vise
Not big but a pepper
Wind through the armor
Cow parched by the sun pants at the moon
Cows run with the wind, horses run against it6
Burned lips on broth, now blows on cold water
Frog forgets he had legs
Won’t garden for care of worms
Ants on a millstone, whichever way they walk, they go around with it
Tree envies the bird, bird builds a nest
Spider stuck in the web
Did you get them?? Which was the hardest to understand?
Do you think you would know how to apply them as real-life situations arose? I think that would represent a kind of (literary?) wisdom. I’m convinced that this is what the biblical book of Proverbs is actually after: not giving readers a series of truisms that we can apply whenever and wherever, but giving us frames of reference which we need to learn to apply wisely.
The book of Proverbs wants to make readers wise. And the way to do that isn’t to give students the answers. It’s to give concepts that need to be tried on, applied, and practiced.
Bonus: some Yiddish proverbs that I don’t understand because I don’t share the same cultural assumptions, as an illustration of the way proverbs rely on shared assumptions for their density to work.
If grandma had wheels, she would be a wagon.
A goat has a beard too, and it’s still just a goat.
A guest is like rain.
He couldn’t attach a tail to a cat.
An ox has a long tongue but can't blow a shofar.
Shout-out the real fans who already know the definition.
It’s called “The Instruction of Amenemope,” and the copy we found is potentially 3000 years old. Prov 22:17–23:10 are almost all in this collection. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdf/10.1086/480510
Some are from Lakoff and Turner’s More than Cool Reason, some I made up.
.@Kate Turabian, can smileys function as punctuation?
That is, know when to apply them.
This one is a good illustration of the importance of shared assumptions — you probably read it as an encouragement not to “go with the flow.” But that’s only because Westerners tend to think that horses are better than cows.