Ep 388 | Proverbs; Ecclesiastes, Come Follow Me 2026 (Sept 7-13)

Bryce Dunford (0:03)

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Talking Scripture, a podcast where we illustrate relevance and application of the Scriptures in Come Follow Me.

Mike Day (0:10)

We also dive into the history and cultures of the text.

Bryce Dunford (0:13)

Thanks for taking the time to share and subscribe to this podcast.

Mike Day (0:16)

For show notes, head over to our website, talkingscripture.org. Welcome to Talking Scripture. I'm Mike.

Bryce Dunford (0:24)

And I'm Bryce.

Mike Day (0:25)

And today we are going to be in selections of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Bryce Dunford (0:29)

Now, we need to do a quick history because I think everyone says, Oh, Proverbs, Solomon. But I think it's deeper and a little bit more complicated than that. This is a complicated week. Those of you who are going to digest the text are going to struggle a little bit with it. So let's do a little bit of background and history. And then we'll kind of do a big picture. If you had to just sum up the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in a single thought, what would it be?

Mike Day (0:55)

I love the very beginning of it. It's Mishlei Shlomo. We always call him Solomon, but he was called Shlomo. So Mishlei Shlomo or the sayings of Solomon. That's really how it starts. The son of David, the king of Israel. So the tradition tells us that this is really Solomon stuff. As far as his authorship, I mean, that's in question. It says in 1 Kings 4.33 that he spoke thousands of them, covering all facets of the relationships of nature, man and God and so forth. But whether the Proverbs that we have in the Bible include his works or all of them or how much of this is attributed to Solomon, I mean, I would say that's pretty difficult to tell.

In the Hebrew Bible, this book, the Book of Proverbs is called wisdom literature. And wisdom literature in the Old Testament is represented by Proverbs, which we're gonna cover today, Kohelet or Ecclesiastes, which we're also gonna cover today, Job and some of the Psalms. The Apocrypha has a couple other books that are considered wisdom literature as well. But know that a big chunk of this wisdom literature in the Old Testament is going really to be covered today. And so when it comes to tradition, we talked about this, authorship is attributed to Solomon. And what's interesting is if you read some of this wisdom literature, you can see how some of the rabbis attribute it to different periods in Solomon's life. So for example, the Song of Songs or what's called the Song of Solomon, the rabbis would say, well, Solomon wrote that when he was young.

And then when you read Proverbs, which we're going to cover today, many of the historians, many of the rabbis say, well, that was written by Solomon when he was in his midlife. And then when you read Ecclesiastes, which is like one of the themes of Ecclesiastes is, well, we're all going to die. What's the point? And so a lot of people say, well, maybe Solomon wrote that when he was old. Now, I don't know, but just know that that's kind of traditionally was where they take it. But the content of a lot of these really don't fit Solomon's time period. So just know that there's some sticky issues going on with history. I certainly don't know. I wasn't there. So I'm not really going to take a position. I leave it for you, the reader, to decide. But I would say this, that in the time period of the monarchy, there were a lot of people in scribal schools. And remember, once we have statecraft, once we can collect taxes, we can then issue literacy programs and we can train youth. And the really gifted ones can become scribes for the king, and they can go and work in what are called scribal schools. And we think that a lot of these texts were replicated during this time period because remember, they don't have a printing press. So if you want to have a text, you have to have a scribe with a pen in hand, get busy. And so we think that many of these wisdom books were written and replicated during this time.

Maybe it went through several editions. We don't have an urtext or an original text. And I would say this, we probably don't have an urtext of really anything. All we have is copies of copies of copies, and a lot of this stuff was oral.

And we can also see this in history that there were wisdom books that were written in Egypt, probably as early as the 2000s BC. So long time before Jesus, long time before Nephi, even a thousand years before the monarchy with David. There were scribal schools in Egypt that wrote wisdom literature. And some of their works of wisdom literature are also in Proverbs. And so the fancy way that they determine this in scholarship is they call it Egyptian priority, meaning that the Egyptian wisdom texts have priority over the Proverbs. And there's some stuff in Proverbs that was probably copied from wisdom literature in Egypt.