Proverbs: Old Testament Library [OTL] (Paperback

Through translation, technical notes, and insightful commentary, Richard Clifford sheds new understanding on Proverbs. By focusing on the rhetoric of Proverbs, Clifford demonstrates how the book fosters a lifelong search for wisdom, and enables readers to see how the instructions and sayings are concerned with contemporary issues. Two sentences from the great eighteenth-century English aphorist Samuel Johnson can serve as a motto to Proverbs and to this commentary. Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The book of Proverbs does not primarily provide information; its instructions are remarkably empty of content and its maxims, when rephrased, are often trite. Rather, it informs by giving its readers a perspective. To quote Johnson on the achievement of Alexander Pope: New things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new. Proverbs is about vision and action. From the Preface