Summary: Bible - Wisdom and Poetry Books

The GIST

Wisdom and Poetry Books is the name given to five books in the Bible's Old Testament: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, also called the Song of Songs. They are known as well as the Poetic Books or the Sapiential Books, and they are the Bible's great books of Hebrew poetry. In them a ruined man argues his case against heaven, a songbook gathers a hundred and fifty prayers, a father coaches his son in good sense, a king looks back on everything he built and calls it vanity, and two lovers sing to each other among vineyards and gardens.

They matter because they take up the questions that never go away. Why do good people suffer? How should an ordinary day be lived? What can honestly be said to God in grief and in joy? What lasts, when everyone dies? The five books do not answer in one voice. Proverbs is confident that the upright stand and the wicked fall; Job and Ecclesiastes put that confidence under heavy strain; the Psalms pray their way through both moods; the Song simply delights.

What It Says

Job: the upright man who suffers

In the land of Uz lives Job, a man "perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil," with seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels: "the greatest of all the men of the east." Then disaster strikes. When the sons of God come to present themselves before the LORD, Satan comes with them, "From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it," and the LORD points to Job as a man without equal, one who still holds to his integrity even though he has been struck "without cause." By the time Job speaks, his wealth, his family and his health are gone.

What follows is one of the great arguments in literature. Job breaks his silence by cursing the day of his birth: "Let the day perish wherein I was born." Three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, answer him in turn, and all three reason the same way: pain like this must be a punishment, so Job must have done wrong. "Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent?" asks Eliphaz. "Doth God pervert judgment?" asks Bildad. Zophar is the harshest, telling Job that "God exacteth of thee less than thine iniquity deserveth."

Job will not accept it. He calls them "physicians of no value" and "miserable comforters," and he points at what their theory cannot explain: "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?" What he wants is a hearing: "Oh that I knew where I might find him!" And he swears, "till I die I will not remove mine integrity from me." A younger man, Elihu, then bursts in, angry at Job "because he justified himself rather than God" and at the friends for condemning him without an answer.

At last "the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind," and the answer is not an explanation. It is a storm of questions: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" and "Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?" Faced with that majesty, Job gives way: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." He repents "in dust and ashes," and he is restored. The friends' tidy rule, that pain always proves guilt, is the thing the book refuses.

Psalms: every emotion, prayed

The Psalms gather 150 pieces for singing and praying, the work of David, Asaph, Moses and other hands. The first one sets a wisdom note, "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly," and the last is pure noise and joy: "Praise him with the sound of the trumpet."

Between those two lies every state of the soul. There are psalms of praise, which look up ("The heavens declare the glory of God"). There are psalms of trust: "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want," and the steadying "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." There are laments, which are startlingly direct: "How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever?" and "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" One mourns a whole people's loss: "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." There is confession, "Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness," and there is thanksgiving.

There are also royal psalms, prayers for the king such as "Give the king thy judgments, O God," and the collection has often been read as looking ahead to a Messianic king. Taken together they show a faith with room for complaint as well as praise, in which nothing a person feels is kept out of prayer.

Proverbs: wisdom for ordinary days

Proverbs announces itself as "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel," and states its purpose plainly: "To give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion." Its motto comes at once: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction." Wisdom here is not cleverness. It begins in reverence, and it shows in how a person works, speaks and treats other people.

The opening chapters are a father's talks to a child addressed as "My son." He warns against the "strange woman" whose lips "drop as an honeycomb" but whose "end is bitter as wormwood." He sends the lazy to an unexpected teacher: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." And he turns Wisdom herself into a woman. She "crieth at the gates" of the city, she is "better than rubies," she has "builded her house" with "seven pillars," and she invites the simple to her table.

From the tenth chapter the book changes into short, two-line sayings, most of them setting one way of living against another. "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." "A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." Nor are the sayings meant to be applied without thought. "Answer not a fool according to his folly" is followed in the very next verse by "Answer a fool according to his folly," and the reader is left to judge which the moment needs. Friendship gets its own hard truth: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend."

The book ends with other voices: the words of Agur, who prays "give me neither poverty nor riches," and the teaching King Lemuel learned from his mother, which leads into the portrait that begins, "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies."

Ecclesiastes: all is vanity

Ecclesiastes gives "The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem," a speaker often taken to be Solomon in his later years, and it begins with its verdict: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity." Generations come and go, the sun rises and sets, and "there is no new thing under the sun."

The Preacher has tested this for himself. He pursued wisdom and found that "he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." He tried laughter and wine. He built houses, planted vineyards and gardens, and gathered silver and gold. Then he looked at it all, "and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit." The wise man and the fool die alike, since "one event happeneth to them all," and whatever a man has made is left to someone who never worked for it.

Even so, the book is not despair. Again and again it returns to a modest, grateful answer: "There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour." Its famous poem accepts that life comes in seasons: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven," including "A time to be born, and a time to die." He praises companionship ("Two are better than one") and effort ("Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might"). And he stays honest about the world, observing that "the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong," since "time and chance happeneth to them all."

The closing chapter is a haunting picture of old age, introduced with the plea, "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth." Then comes the conclusion of the whole matter: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man."

Song of Solomon: love as strong as death

The last book is a love poem, attributed in its first line to Solomon, and although the King James text names no speakers, its voices are plainly those of a woman and the man she loves, with the daughters of Jerusalem addressed again and again. It opens without preamble: "Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine." Soon the beloved's own invitation is reported: Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone.

The poem moves between meeting and losing. Twice the speaker tells of searching for him by night through the city streets, past the watchmen: "I sought him, but I found him not." The lovers praise each other in lavish images of flocks, towers, spices and lilies, and a refrain warns the daughters of Jerusalem to "stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please." Its language of belonging is mutual: "My beloved is mine, and I am his." And near the end it makes its great claim: "love is strong as death," and "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it."

Why It Matters

These books form a recognised division of the Christian Bible, and how many books it holds depends on the canon. Protestant Bibles count the five described here. Other canons count seven, adding Wisdom and Sirach, two books that come down through the Greek Septuagint and are absent from the Hebrew Masoretic Text; Protestants regard them as apocryphal, so the King James Bible set them between the Old and New Testaments and other Protestant Bibles leave them out. Measured against the Tanakh, the five are its three poetic books from the Ketuvim plus two of the Five Megillot, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs.

Traditions have read them in different ways. The Song has been taken literally, as a celebration of human love, and allegorically, as a picture of God's love for his people. The Psalms have been read as pointing to a Messianic king. What unites all five is their honesty. Job and Ecclesiastes say out loud that the upright can suffer and the wicked can prosper; the Psalms complain and praise in the same collection; Proverbs and Ecclesiastes both come to rest on the fear of God; and the Song sets human desire inside scripture.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants the Bible at its most human should start here. These books are for the grieving, who will find in Job and the laments words that do not flinch; for the practical, who will find in Proverbs advice on speech, work, money and friendship; for sceptics, who will meet in Ecclesiastes a voice as unsparing as their own; for people who pray, or wish they could, who will find in the Psalms a prayer for every mood; and for lovers of poetry, who will find in the Song a celebration of desire.