The proverbs of Solomon
the son of David,
king of Israel:
To know wisdom and instruction,
To perceive the words of understanding,
To receive the instruction of wisdom,
Justice, judgment, and equity;
To give prudence to the simple,
To the young man knowledge and discretion—
A wise man will hear and increase learning,
And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel,
To understand a proverb and an enigma,
The words of the wise and their riddles.
(Proverbs 1:1-6 NKJV)
And verse 6 in the King James Version:
To understand a proverb, and the interpretation;
the words of the wise, and their dark sayings.
The book of Proverbs was written to give us understanding and wisdom. And there certainly are many wise sayings that can clearly be understood in a completely normal literal way. But there are also mingled with these, sayings that have a deeper meaning. Often these deeper meanings are "under" the plain literal meaning. These "dark sayings" or "riddles" are not obvious at all. They are hidden under the plain meaning. Most people will never see many of these hidden sayings. It is my hope to give some examples of these hidden meanings so that you may acquire the skill to see them as you meditate on the word of God.
It is the glory of God
to conceal a matter,
But the glory of kings
is to search out a matter.
(Proverbs 25:2)
I will start with the first "enigma" proverb that I came to understand in my young years.
I grew up on a farm, and my dad was a very hard worker. He got up early every morning of the week to milk the cows, by hand. On the week days he worked stacking lumber at the Weyerhaeuser Lumber Co. Then after dinner he would milk the cows again, seven days a week, and go to bed early so he could do it all again the next day. On Saturdays he worked hard doing all the things that needed to be done. On those Saturdays and evenings he worked on the house. He built two bedrooms upstairs in what had been just an attic. He had many other projects and chores to fill in all his time.
I, by comparison, was quite lazy and didn't like to get up in the morning, or go to bed early at night. I was interested in electricity, and liked to tinker with radios as long as I could at night. I wasn't interested in farming and wasn't very helpful in all that work. I was lazy.
So when I would read Proverbs, the verses that stood out to me were the ones about the slothful man and the sluggard. I always felt condemned by those verses.
So one day I was reading in Proverbs and came across one of these verses:
A lazy man buries his hand in the bowl,
And will not so much as bring it to his mouth again.
(Proverbs 19:24)
As I read it, my first thought was, "O Lord, I am such a lazy person." But then I had a thought, "Wait a minute. What did that say?" "buries his hand in the bowl?" Now if his hand is buried in the bowl, there must be something in the bowl! The bowl is not empty. Now what is in the bowl must be food, because his problem is that he "will not so much as bring it to his mouth again."
What?
That makes no sense! There ain't no lazy man like that!
No matter how lazy a person may be, if he has food in front of him, the least he will do is eat!
As soon as I realized the absurdity of the picture, I saw an answer to the riddle.
There was a "dark saying" under the literal words.
Our physical food is a shadow of the real food, the spiritual food. A "shadow" is always "dark." So the "dark saying" was written about the physical food, but the real food, the spiritual food gives light. And light casts shadows.
So what does the proverb mean?
Well this lazy man has his "hand" buried in the bowl. He may be a religious leader, a pastor, a missionary or a teacher. So he may be buried in his "Christian" work, but does not take the time to meditate on the "words" he is buried in. Meditating is like a cow chewing the cud to get more nutrients out of the food. God's law requires animals that the Israelites could eat to be "clean." And there are two things required for an animal (a land animal) to be clean:
They must have a cloven hoof.
They must chew the cud.
This "lazy man" may be very busy putting his hand to the work, but is not taking time to get nourishment into his own mouth.
When I saw the meaning under the literal words of this proverb, it forever changed the way I read the Bible. I then knew that there were many more hidden things under the literal words of the Bible.
So for me, one of the first clues that there is something hidden in a verse, is when the plain literal words seem strange. This one, this "lazy man" was not like any lazy person I could imagine, literally. It truly was a "dark saying."
As I have already mentioned, for a land animal to be "clean" to be eaten, it must have both a cloven (divided) hoof, and chew the cud. It explicitly spells out that one or the other is not enough, it must have both.
So here we have another "dark saying", a shadow of a spiritual picture. As I mentioned above, chewing the cud is a "shadow" of meditating on the word of God. And we know that Jesus taught in parables.
A parable is literally a "beside-throw." Let me explain. The word "parable" comes directly from a Greek "parabola" (παραβολη), which is composed of two Greek words "para" (παρα) and "bola" (βολη.) "Para" means "beside" as in "parallel" lines are beside each other (the same distance from each other everywhere.) And "bola" means to throw, and is where the English word "ball" comes from, because you typically "throw" a ball. So together it is a "beside-throw."
Now what that means is that a "parable" is a story about natural things, physical things that we are familiar with; like planting a garden, herding sheep, or tending a vineyard. But what Jesus is really talking about is spiritual things like "the Kingdom of God." So he "throws" His story "beside" what He is really trying to communicate. And then He explains to his learners (disciples) what the items in His story mean in the spiritual picture. For example from Matthew 13 we have:
18 “Listen then to what the parable of the sower means: 19 When anyone hears the message about the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. This is the seed sown along the path. 20 The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. 21 But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ...
So the "message of the Kingdom" is like the seed, ... OR "the seed" in the parable is like "the message of the Kingdom" He is really talking about. And the seed falling on the packed pathway doesn't fall down into the soil, it just sits on the hard surface where the birds come and take it away and eat it. This is like when someone hears the word and nothing "sinks in" (they don't understand it.) Then the birds are like Satan who comes and takes the word away, so they don't even remember at all what they heard. ... And so on.
So when you hear a parable, you need to meditate on it, think about it from different angles to understand what it is really talking about. This is like a cow chewing the cud, the grass that it ate earlier. We sometimes even say, when we hear something new and unfamiliar, ... we say I'm going to have to chew on that a while.
So you see "chewing the cud" is a "dark saying", a shadow of meditating on God's word. This is a requirement to be "clean" which means to be "righteous," or without the dirt of "sin" in our thinking and life.
Now what about the "split hoof" or "divided hoof"? Remember you need both, to chew the cud and have a divided hoof.
I have come to understand this one as having to do with our "walk" through life. First you need to learn to "divide" the Words of Jesus (and God) into what parts are physical and what are spiritual. Then your "walk" needs to be according to both the literal meaning (where applicable), and our spiritual walk. We need to chew the cud, meditate, to understand both physical and spiritual, and then to walk according to both.
I'll give one more example of a kind-of a dark saying, a shadow picture. This one we'll take from the Old Testament original Hebrew and then connect it with the New Testament.
We have numerous places in the Old Testament where in a war, it says something like "they slew [some people] with the edge of the sword." There are over 30 verses in the Old Testament (in the New King James Version) where it has "with the edge of the sword." Here is one short example:
So Joshua defeated Amalek and his people with the edge of the sword.
(Exodus 17:13)
And twelve more of these are in the book of Joshua. Notice that the one in Exodus says "Joshua defeated..." (I had not noticed this fact until I was looking up verses as I am writing this section just now.) This is very meaningful because "Joshua" is in fact the same name that "Jesus" actually is in the time He lived. The name "Jesus" is the result of taking the name "Yashua" (really = English "Joshua") when translating into Greek, there is no "sh" sound in Greek, there is no letter "h" in Greek, so the "h" disappeared, and Greek words have a variety of endings, so the "s" at the end is from Greek. Greek also didn't have a "y," so the first letter was "i" (Greek iota, ι). So "Yashua" became "Iesus" in Greek. (The vowels always float around changing easily.) Then before about the middle of the 1600's, when the Bible was translated into "King James English", "j" was just beginning to be an English letter. It was an elongated "i", that's why it has a dot, like an "i" and a curved tail. It only occurred in English words that previously had a double "i", the second one got elongated to "j" in a few names like Abijah, originally Abiiah. So that is how our English Old Testament "Joshua" became our English New Testament "Jesus." They really are exactly the same name!
Wow, sorry that took a lot of explaining!
We will see some amazing connections after a bit more strange language stuff.
The word "edge" ... There are several different words meaning "edge" in the Hebrew Old Testament. Things like the edge of a table, or the edge of a garment, have Hebrew words. But the "edge of a sword" is not any of the more common words for "edge." In fact this word is a very common word, but not usually translated "edge." It is simply the word "mouth." The Hebrew word is "peh" which the name of the Hebrew letter corresponding to our "P". And this letter "peh" in the ancient picto-graphic Hebrew alphabet is actually a little picture of a mouth. And the name of that letter is "peh" which means mouth.
Now to be "fair" our visible mouth (lips) are really the "edges" of the "hole" in our face for inserting food. And we use the word "lip" to speak of the edge of a jar opening, for example. So, while "edge" is a perfectly reasonable and accurate translation for this word "peh," the word is literally "mouth." Now we have additional support for this fact because of the Greek translation. So if we think of "the edge of the sword" as an "idiom" (which is a group of words that when combined, have a meaning different from the literal words.) When we translate "idiom for Idiom" we pick words in the second language that convey the intended meaning of the first even though the literal words have different meaning. So the "mouth" of the sword in English becomes the "edge" of the sword. But in the Greek Translation of the Hebrew, the Septuagint, they translated the words literally into Greek as "the mouth of the sword." The Greek word really is the word for "mouth" not "edge." This literal translation should have been brought over into English also, because there is a profound amazing set of connections from the Old testament to the New, that are now lost to us.
So let it sink in that throughout the whole Bible it really should be "the mouth of the sword" in Hebrew, Greek and English.
Then consider this verse in Ephesians 6 where Paul speaks of being prepared for the battle, the war:
And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God;
(Ephesians 6:17)
The "sword" of the Spirit is the "Word" that comes out of our mouth when we preach the gospel. So you see it is absolutely connected to our mouth!
And the sword in the Old Testament "kills," but in the New Testament it gives life to our spirit, but in doing that, it "kills the flesh", as we see in Paul's words:
For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish.
(Galatians 5:17)
So you see our war is very different from the literal physical wars in the Old Testament. They were the dark sayings of the Old Testament, "shadows" of the light in the New Testament reality. What a most wonderful reality there is in the New Testament Good News! So far superior to the Old Testament dark shadow pictures.
But there's more!
In Revelation, we see Jesus... Remember that name corresponds exactly with "Joshua" in the Old Testament. But how is he described?
He had in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance was like the sun shining in its strength.
(Revelation 1:16)“And to the angel of the church in Pergamos write, ‘These things says He who has the sharp two-edged sword:
(Revelation 2:12)
But remember that should be (and actually is in the Greek) "out of His mouth went a sharp two-mouthed sword." And "the sharp two-mouthed sword" also in 2:12.
And finally we have a connections with the whole section on parables in the previous example: Jesus spoke in parables, stories with two meanings. So the parables were the sharp two-mouthed sword (words) "coming out of His mouth!"
Oh how thrilling it is to see these amazing connections woven together through the whole Bible!