Q. If The Books of The Bible has the desired impact, in the future will we see the guy at the football game holding up a sign that just reads, ‘John’?
I’m sure we’ve all seen the “John 3:16” signs on televised football games. There may even be some signs like this at the Super Bowl on Sunday.
This question provides a great illustration of how The Books of the Bible, the version these study guides are designed to be used with, encourages referencing not by chapter and verse, but by content and context.
The word count is pretty limited on those signs, but if you had the chance to speak with someone at slightly more length, think of how much more meaningful it would be to refer contextually to “what Jesus told Nicodemus when he came to see him early in the gospel of John,” rather than to use the chapter and verse shorthand. Or, by content, you could refer to how the Bible tells that that “God loved the world so much that He gave his only Son,” summarizing the message rather than just giving its address.
Along these lines, instead of reading simply “JOHN,” a sign at a football game might say something like this:
GOD LOVED THE WORLD – GOD GAVE HIS SON.
Or, in bigger letters:
GOD LOVED
GOD GAVE
I bet that would get the attention of the television cameras.
Q. I don’t know if I’ve really ever gotten through to God in prayer. Some great things have happened to me over the years and I’ve said, “Thank you, God” for them. I’ve looked up at the stars and said, “Wow, that’s awesome, God!” But I’ve also been through some really tough things, and I’ve prayed about them, too, but I’m not sure what happened.
I knew I should never ask for anything selfish, like riches. I just prayed for God’s will to be evident, or for a really sick friend to be healed, or for some victims of a horrible accident, or financial problems to be straightened out. I’ve tried the “If it’s your will, Lord” prayers. Some worked out, some didn’t.
I’ve read many verses about prayer. One says to ask believing that it has already been done for you. Another says, “Ask, seek, knock.” There’s that parable Jesus told about the widow getting her wish because she wears the unjust judge out with her asking.
I’ve heard a lot of answers to this problem: “Just trust God and He will reveal Himself.” “We can never know the Mind of God.” “He knows the best thing for us, even if we can’t see it now.” “God wants us to speak with Him as a young child, so keep praying.” “Jesus showed us how to pray, so follow His example.” “Many people prayed for things and it came about, so don’t give up.” I need some assurance at this point.
Thank you for this honest and heartfelt question, which I’m sure many, many other readers of this blog will feel as well. Prayer is central to the relationship we’re meant to have with God, but it’s also complex and mysterious, and I don’t pretend to be able to explain everything about it. But I can share with you some of the things I think I’ve discovered from the prayers in the Scriptures.
I think your question itself illustrates one essential point: prayer is not meant to be primarily a way of asking for things; rather, it’s a way of living in relationship with God. And you’re already living in relationship with God through prayer. You describe how you use it to express your thanks for his blessings and your praise for his wonders. In other words, sometimes there’s not an expectation that a prayer will be “answered” with a particular result. It’s just a way for us to express ourselves to God. I’m certain that in those prayers, you got through.
The Bible is full of prayers of praise and thanksgiving. In fact, biblical prayers typically contain a much higher percentage of praise and thanksgiving than ours often do. So one important thing we can learn about prayer from the Bible is to use it regularly to express our gratitude and wonder to God.
Another important purpose we discover in the Scriptures is this: talking to God in prayer enables us to move from a place where we are questioning God’s power and goodness to a place where we have a confident trust in God, even in troubling circumstances. The most common kind of psalm by far is the “psalm of supplication,” whose essential purpose is to enable the writer to make this move. (This is discussed at length in the Psalms study guide, in sessions 2 and 7-11.) In these biblical psalms of supplication we see people make it to all stages along the way from questioning to trust. It’s a powerful and helpful model for us.
So in this case the expected result is not so much in the world around us, but inside us. It sounds to me that prayer also “worked” for you when you were able to trust God with the really tough things that were happening to you.
But I recognize that your ultimate question is about those times when we are hoping for and expecting a result in the world around us: for someone to be healed physically, or for a material need to be met, or for a relationship to mended–things like that. We would know that we’d “gotten through” if we got the result we were praying for. And what I see in the Bible is that prayer is also meant to be a means by which God can use us as his agents to bring about results like these. In other words, God wants to work through our prayers to achieve his purposes.
We often see this happen in the Bible. For example, the early church in Acts was “earnestly praying to God” for Peter’s release from prison, and he was miraculously set free. We also see it in Nehemiah’s prayer for favor with his king, who let him go to Jerusalem to rebuild its walls. We see it in Daniel’s prayer for the return of the exiles, and in many other places.
However, we also have to acknowledge that in the Bible we see some petitions and intercessions (that is, prayers for oneself and for others) fail to achieve the desired result. Just before the apostle Peter was miraculously released from Herod’s prison, the apostle James was put to death by Herod. But I’m sure the early church was praying for the safety and deliverance of both men.
The clearest example for me is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He made a specific request: “May this cup be taken from me” (in other words, keep me from being executed). But he was crucified anyway. If even Jesus didn’t get what he asked for, how can any of us be sure that our prayers ever get through?
Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Church of St. Esteban,Salamanca
But I think Jesus’ experience in Gethsemane actually illustrates one more important thing about prayer. When God wants to work through our prayers, he calls us into an interactive process of speaking and listening. This process may last for days or even weeks, rather than take place in one concentrated night as in Gethsemane. (I think that’s what Jesus wanted to show us through the parable of the widow and the judge.) Over the course of this process, we come to discern the will of God more and more clearly, so that we can pray with more and more confidence for it. The ultimate goal is for us to receive bold faith from a clear assurance of God’s will, and to see the prayer that’s prayed in that faith answered. I think Jesus’ teachings about “ask, seek, knock” and “believing that we have already received” apply to these cases specifically.
But the description of this process suggests that we begin in a place where we don’t have a clear assurance of God’s will. That’s where the “if it’s your will, Lord” comes in. We begin by saying what we think God might want for us, but with the expectation that we will hear from God in response (if not in an audible voice, then at least in a change of heart, a new perspective, or something like that). In light of that response, we adapt our prayers, and the process of speaking and listening continues until we reach either a place where we are completely surrendered to God’s will, whatever that might be, or a place where we have a confident assurance of God’s will and a bold faith that our prayers will be instrumental in its realization.
It’s eye-opening and encouraging for me to think that, on this model, Jesus in Gethsemane actually began in a place where he wasn’t certain that it was God’s will for him to receive what he was asking for–an escape from the cross–and that he reached a place not where he knew his petition would be granted, but where he was yielded to God’s will, even if it wasn’t what he was asking for. I’d say he definitely “got through” on that occasion, and perhaps, looking back on your experiences, you’ll recognize some where you “got through” in the same way. But I hope you’ll also recognize some experiences where your initial impulse to pray for something turned out to be what God wanted, and that he used your prayers over time to bring about his purposes.
Q. One of the things I struggle with most is God requesting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. I get the dynamic between God and Abraham on this, but why wouldn’t God at least have done it when Isaac was a baby and couldn’t remember it? It just seems cruel to me to inflict lifelong psychological damage on someone from the terror and other emotions that your father tying you up, ready to sacrifice you, would cause. I’m not sure any level of faith in God would compensate for the damage that would do to a person.
In these study guides, I often ask groups to envision particular biblical stories through the eyes of one of their characters. Your question is a sensitive and compassionate one that arises from a perceptive reading of this story through Isaac’s eyes.
We typically interpret this story from God’s perspective and see in it a foreshadowing of the substitutionary atonement: “God himself will provide the lamb.” Or, we see it from Abraham’s perspective and read it as an object lesson in faith and difficult obedience. (Charles Spurgeon preached a famous sermon on this passage, using Abraham as a positive example, about the kind of obedience that faith produces: immediate, unconditional, complete, etc.)
But when we see the story through Isaac’s eyes, it is pretty terrifying. It would be bad enough to be tied up and nearly sacrificed by anybody, but for your father to do this, when he’s supposed to be your protector, would be devastating.
One possibility to consider is that Isaac might have experienced this event somewhat differently from the way a person would today. This story is, among other things, about Abraham and his family coming to understand better the character of the God who has called them into a covenant relationship in order to make them a blessing to the whole world. Considered in that light, it’s actually a polemic against human sacrifice, which was widely practiced in this place and time.
It’s not as though God thought up human sacrifice as an extreme way to test Abraham’s loyalty. Rather, God was asking of Abraham what it was believed the other gods were asking of their followers. When Abraham demonstrated his complete devotion, God then made clear that he didn’t want human sacrifices.
But going into the story, Abraham and Isaac don’t yet realize how different God is from the other so-called gods in this respect. This is why neither one of them balks when they realize that a human sacrifice is in view (Abraham at the beginning, Isaac later on): if you didn’t do what the gods expected of you, they would bring disaster on you and your family. In effect, Isaac may not have expected his father to protect him from a demand like this from the gods–no one was able to defy them, and trying to do so would only expose the family to greater danger and damage. Children today don’t have issues with their parents for not keeping a tornado from hitting their house.
But I think this is only a secondary answer. I agree with you that, whatever the cultural differences, for Isaac to be tied up by his own father and nearly turned into a human sacrifice must have been terrifying and traumatic on some level. So the primary answer must be that coming to know God deeply and truly as our Heavenly Father can and does bring healing from the psychological damage we suffer through things our parents do. If they fail to protect us, or if they actively harm us, this does more damage than almost any other person could cause. But even when this has happened, coming to know God, in a deep relational sense, as our Heavenly Father brings emotional and psychological healing by reassuring us of our infinite worth in his eyes and giving us renewed confidence in his love and protection. And this is what I hope all readers of this story from Isaac’s life will experience.
In your guide to Paul’s Journey Letters (session 2), you ask us which of the instructions at the end of 1 Thessalonians we’d most like to see put into practice in our community of Jesus’ followers. Our small group has a couple of questions about one of those instructions. It’s the one that the TNIV translates “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire,” but which other versions such as the ESV translate “Do not quench the Spirit.”
First of all, which is it, the Spirit or the Spirit’s fire? Why the difference in translation?
And then, if it is fire, how are we to understand what that means within the context of the letter? There are numerous references throughout the Old and New Testaments of God’s presence/Spirit coming in the form of fire, so it’s easy for a reader to project this kind of imagery here. I suppose this is a specific case of a more general question: To what extent is it appropriate/accurate/permissible to project extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context? It seems to me that the answer cannot be “never” nor “always,” which means that it’s somewhere in between.
In this instruction Paul uses the Greek verb sbennúo, which means “to put out a fire.” (This root is found in our word asbestos, which originally referred to a substance, quicklime, that couldn’t be put out when it was on fire; pouring water on it only made it flame higher. Ironically, the word was then erroneously applied to a substance that couldn’t catch on fire, and the name, even though opposite in meaning, stuck!)
Asbestos
In Paul’s sentence the Spirit is the simple object of this verb; the word “fire” as an attribute or possession of the Spirit does not appear. So “do not quench the Spirit” is the more literal translation. The reading “do not put out the Spirit’s fire” appears in the 1978 and 1984 editions of the NIV as well as in the TNIV, but in the latest update to the NIV (2011), the reading is now “do not quench the Spirit.” So leading translations are converging in their understanding of what the object in the sentence should be.
I’m not sure they’ve gotten the verb translated right yet, however. Sbennúo can be used in a more literal sense of putting out a fire (e.g. as in Ephesians, “Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one”), but it can also be used in a more figurative sense, to describe doing to something what you would do to a fire to put it out. And so I think an even better translation of Paul’s instruction would be, “Do not stifle the Spirit,” particularly since the very next phrase (not necessarily a separate sentence) is, “do not treat prophecies with contempt.” In other words, if the Spirit wants to speak to you in your gatherings, let the Spirit speak, and listen. So the notion of fire, certainly associated with God’s Spirit in many places in the Bible, is not necessarily present here.
This means that this instruction may be an even better example than you perhaps realized of readers projecting extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context! I agree with you that we must expect readers to do this kind of thing sometimes, because words are full of meaning and they are bound to have associations for readers beyond what those who first used them intended. I’d say that we need to recognize that reading is a creative act, but that at the same time, like any creative act, it should be constrained by considerations that keep it from becoming so wild that it’s meaningless. I’d argue that these considerations include the author’s overall perspectives and social and historical context. These must exert some control over the meanings we bring in to an author’s words.
So while Paul probably meant “do not stifle the Spirit,” he was using a word figuratively that means more literally “put out a fire,” and in that word the rich biblical associations of the Spirit-as-fire can be heard echoing. This is particularly true since Paul was writing self-consciously within the biblical literary tradition, as evidenced by his frequent quotations from and allusions to the earlier Scriptures. So when we read the instruction not to “quench” the Spirit, I think we do have the freedom to think about what this means in light of the broader biblical imagery of the Spirit-as-fire, so long as we don’t miss Paul’s main point about allowing the Spirit to speak through individual members to gatherings of Jesus’ followers.
As my small group was using the guide to Paul’s Journey Letters, a question came up in 2 Thessalonians. In one section, Paul says that some will perish “because they refused to love the truth.” But in the very next section, he tells the Thessalonians, “God chose you as firstfruits to be saved.” The first statement seems to place agency in the hands (and hearts and minds) of individuals, while the second one seems to imply God’s agency in determining who is saved. How do we reconcile ostensibly contradictory statements that are right next to each other? What is the bigger picture we are missing?
This isn’t the only place in the Bible where God’s sovereignty and human moral responsibility are asserted in the very same place. For example, Peter says about Jesus in his message on the day of Pentecost, as recorded by Luke in the book of Acts, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”
Benjamin West, “St. Peter Preaching at Pentecost”
It seems to me that divine sovereignty and human responsibility are two sides of a mystery or paradox that we today have much more difficulty reconciling and living with than the biblical authors did. So how can we reach the place where we’re as comfortable with this paradox as they were?
I find it helpful to think about this by analogy to the understanding the community of Jesus’ followers eventually reached, after centuries of debate, about whether he was divine or human. The answer was, “Both.” The Council of Chalcedon proclaimed in AD 451 that Jesus was “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” That is, he was somehow 100% divine and 100% human at the same time, without it being possible to say which things he said and did as God and which things he said and did as a man, and without either nature getting in the way of the other.
We might say similarly that when a person is saved, this is the result of a process or action that is “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” Paul says in 2 Thessalonians, after all, that when people “refuse to love the truth and so be saved,” “God sends them a powerful delusion so they will believe the lie.” Divine and human agency working simultaneously—in this case, unfortunately negatively, but the same thing happens positively when a person is saved.
The practical takeaway is to acknowledge that we have a human moral responsibility to respond to God’s gracious offer of salvation through the gospel, but also to acknowledge in all humility that our salvation is a work of God achieved only through the incarnation, life, ministry, atoning death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Q. I have a question. What do you think Christ “did” for three days after he descended into hell?
The Bible doesn’t tell us very much about what Jesus did between the time he died on the cross and when he was raised from the dead, but it does give us a couple of tantalizing hints.
Peter writes in his first letter, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah when the ark was being built.”
This suggests that Jesus, between his death and resurrection, went in the Spirit and actively preached the gospel to those who had perished centuries before in the great flood. Perhaps these people, because of the great wickedness on the earth at that time, were considered not to have had a reasonable opportunity to respond to God, and so Jesus came and proclaimed the gospel to them in its fullness, in light of his just-completed death on the cross.
Even though Peter doesn’t mention people from other historical periods, since his concern in this part of the letter is to develop an analogy between baptism and rescue from the flood in the ark, it’s possible that on this occasion Jesus also proclaimed the gospel to other “imprisoned spirits” who had lived at different times. Peter says more generally later in this letter that “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regards to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”
Paul gives us a suggestion that some of those who heard the gospel under these circumstances responded positively. In Ephesians he quotes from Psalm 68, “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train,” and then applies these words to Christ: “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the depths of the earth?” The “captives” would be the souls whom Jesus led out of their “imprisonment” after they responded positively to the gospel when he proclaimed it.
From these biblical hints about what Jesus did between his death and resurrection, the community of his followers later developed the doctrine of the “harrowing of hell.” To “harrow” means to despoil; the idea is that Jesus triumphed over hell and released its captives. This doctrine has a rich history in the art and literature of the church.
Our church believes that the gift of prophecy is still available today. There’s one man in the church who recently predicted something that didn’t happen. The Bible says in Deuteronomy that if a prophet’s words don’t come true, they’re not genuine. I mean, we’re not going to kill this guy or anything (as it also says to do in Deuteronomy), but is he a false prophet?
I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule to the question of whether someone who speaks prophetically is genuine. The book of Deuteronomy offers us more than one test of a false prophet. One is that their predictions don’t come true. But another is that even if their predictions do come true, if they then say “let us go after other gods,” they are false prophets and are not to be trusted. The fulfilled prediction is a test of faith for believers. So we aren’t supposed to go exclusively by outcomes, but by whether a prophet’s words and actions point us to the true God.
Since prophecy is a spiritual gift, we should expect that for budding prophets, there will be a “learning curve.” As they learn to use their gift, they will become sharper and more accurate in their prophecies. The corollary is that those who feel called to develop a prophetic gift and calling should be more restrained at the outset, until they develop confidence in their gifting. That’s why I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule in every case. To me the main test is whether the prophet is calling people faithfully to obedience.
That much said, I have to admit that I lost confidence in a man I had considered a prophet, who made much of the fact that “God had told him” everything he was predicting, when several of his predictions in a row didn’t come true. So there is still something to this test of accuracy.
Another thing to consider is that only a small percentage of prophecy in the Bible is predictive, or “fore-telling.” The rest is exhortation or “forth-telling,” a description of God’s perspective on how the community is conducting itself, rather than a prediction of what God plans to do, whether in mercy or judgment. I would therefore add that a (mature) true prophet will probably come close to these proportions in his or her words to the community.
(A guide to Deuteronomy and Hebrews is available in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series.)
Q. In your Genesis study guide you seem to take for granted that Noah’s flood was a worldwide event. You write, “God must have used some extraordinary means to cause a flood of this magnitude, since ordinary rainfall, even a downpour of forty days, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover all the mountains on earth.” But I’ve heard some people claim instead that this flood was a local event. How would you respond?
You’re right, one school of interpretation does hold that Noah’s flood was a local event in which the waters rose 15 cubits (22 feet) above their usual height, or else this far above their flood stage. This would still be a tremendous flood, but local one. However, the statement in Genesis that the high hills (or mountains) were all covered with water would seem to rule this out.
The statement is actually made within a poetic couplet that’s based on the repetition of meaning, whose second line provides greater focus, as is typical of Hebrew poetry. The couplet can be translated this way:
And the waters were great, exceedingly, exceedingly, upon the earth
and they covered all the high hills that were under the skies;
Five and ten cubits upwards were the waters great
and they covered the high hills.
“All the high hills that were under the skies” are in view, and the claim is that these were covered to a height of 15 cubits, so I think the writer’s intention is to describe a worldwide event.
However, it’s important to remember that all of this is written from an observational perspective. The author of the flood account is reporting that all of the high hills out to the visible horizon (“under the skies”) were covered by the waters. So this would conceivably still allow for a local flood, although it’s being envisioned as a worldwide event.
In either case, however, this would still be a flood of such magnitude that the problem of its mechanism remains. Some extraordinary means must have been responsible, because as I go on to say in the guide, the description of the flood in Genesis, no matter how we interpret it, “doesn’t line up with our modern cosmology. Much of the universe is described here by analogy to things in human experience, so that there are ‘floodgates’ in the sky and ‘springs’ in the ‘great deep.'” So it’s a real challenge to get from the way the author envisioned the created world to the way we understand it today.
I think it’s more profitable to realize that the Genesis account here is describing a wrestling match between the waters and the earth. The waters “were great” or “prevailed” over the earth: “Prevail” in Hebrew is the root GBR, while the adjective “high” applied to the mountains or hills is GBH. Both roots convey the sense of strength and might. In other words, the greatest strength that the earth can muster—supposedly immovable mountains—cannot resist the force that God raises against it.
The flood was sent because almost the entire human race had turned away from God into violence and wickedness, but if they felt nothing could stop them from taking that path, their false sense of security has now been exposed. The story ultimately has a moral lesson, so if the only thing we take away from it is a conclusion about how widespread the flood was, or about how it happened, we’ve missed the point.
For a further discussion of the flood in light of the way the biblical authors envisioned the created world, see this related post.
Okay, you’ve convinced me that there are 130 sayings in one of the collections in the book of Proverbs because this is the numerical value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. But how does knowing this help me be a better Christian? How will it make me more like Jesus?
Many of us may have been encouraged to look, every time we read the Bible, for some specific thing that we should believe or do to become more Christ-like. This, we’ve been told, is how God speaks to us through the Bible and how reading it helps us grow. And so we look for what one person called their “gem of the day,” a bright and inspiring thought to carry with us as we go about our activities.
There’s a real danger to this approach, however. It risks turning us into moralists who are trying hard on their own, in small ways each day, to become better people—to be able to say, as Émile Coué put it, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” What we should want instead is to become genuine followers of Jesus who are implicated in the grand story of God, which Jesus brought to its culmination, followers who are creatively and courageously living out that story in their own lives.
Knowing about Hezekiah’s name and the 130 proverbs won’t help you become a better moralist. But it will help you appreciate more about the story that you find yourself in, if you do want to become more like Jesus.
For one thing, it gives you a better understanding of what the Bible actually is. The Bible isn’t a loose compilation of thousands and thousands of discrete propositions that we need to select and arrange in order to get guidance on various subjects. Rather, it’s a carefully crafted and curated collection of literary compositions, some as short as poetic couplets (proverbs), others as long as the sprawling histories in Samuel-Kings or Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. Seeing the care and intentionality behind the collection of proverbs “compiled by the men of Hezekiah” can help you appreciate the nature of the Bible and the crucial role that God allowed human agents to play in its composition and collection over the centuries. In the Bible, God was letting us humans write his story with him. And that’s what he still wants us to do in our lives today.
Woodcut of Hezekiah burning idols
Seeing the honor that Hezekiah’s men paid to their royal patron by making sure their collection of proverbs came out to the right total (even though they had to repeat some proverbs from the earlier collection of Solomon’s sayings to reach that total) helps us recognize that at a particular moment in Israel’s history, after godless kings had suppressed devotion to the true God, a new righteous king was reshaping the affairs of the kingdom and allowing biblical scholarship to flourish once again. Behind that little number, 130, there’s quite a story about what it took and what it cost to give us the Bible. I personally find this much more inspiring than any “gem of the day” my eye might happen to glance upon and isolate from the flow of the text that makes up the flow of the story.
So, to sum up, details like the 130 proverbs help us appreciate the fabric of the Bible, how it has been woven together from real stories of real people who were striving and struggling to serve God in their own places and times, and who are implicitly calling on us to do the same. When we do, we become more like Jesus as we continue in our own lives the story, of which he is the center, found in the pages of the Bible.
To justify your organization of the book of Proverbs in The Books of the Bible, you claim that the collection of proverbs “compiled by the men of Hezekiah” has 130 sayings in it because this is the value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. But his name is actually spelled different ways in the Bible, so the value could be 136, 140, or 146 instead. Besides, there are 138 verses in this section of Proverbs, or 137 if you don’t count the heading; neither of those match any possible value for Hezekiah’s name.
Hebrew, like several other languages, uses letters for numbers, so every word has a total numerical value that can be employed for symbolic purposes. The argument I’ve made in the introduction to Proverbs in The Books of the Bible and in my study guide to Proverbs/Ecclesiastes/James is that the compilers of this collection put exactly 130 sayings in it as a way of honoring their royal patron.
It is true that the name Hezekiah is spelled different ways in the Bible, resulting in different totals. In the book of Kings, for example, it’s typically Hizqiyahu, which adds up to 136. In the title to the book of Isaiah, it’s Yihizqiyah, which totals 140. And in Chronicles, it’s usually Yihizqiyahu, totaling 146.
However, the issue when it comes to appreciating the design of the book of Proverbs is how the name is actually spelled in the heading in that book that introduces the second collection of Solomon’s proverbs. There it is Hizqiyah, which adds up to 130. If the compilers of the book are using the value of Hezekiah’s name to determine the size of this collection, then 130 is the value we must consider them to be using.
And while it is true that the traditional verse divisions typically do correspond one-to-one with the individual sayings in the book of Proverbs, this is not the case in every part of the book. In this second collection of Solomon’s proverbs specifically, there are several longer sayings that make up more than one verse, for example:
Remove the dross from the silver,
and a silversmith can produce a vessel;
remove wicked officials from the king’s presence,
and his throne will be established through righteousness.
(This is Proverbs 25:4-5 in the traditional numbering.) So there will be something less than 137 actual proverbs in this collection.
It would not be difficult to propose a division of the material that would result in a total of 130 discrete sayings. However, it would be just as easy to dispute this division and suggest a different one that would yield another total. I don’t think it’s possible for us to establish today exactly how the compilers of Proverbs intended for this material to be divided up. However, the way they use, to all appearances, the value of Solomon’s name, 375, to determine the size of the first collection, which clearly contains 375 discrete sayings, strongly implies that the same thing is going on in the second collection of Solomon’s proverbs, the one “compiled by the men of Hezekiah.” This is particularly true since a few proverbs are repeated from the first collection (e.g. “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts,” 18:8 = 26:22), suggesting that the compilers were trying to get up to a particular total.
A reader of this post has asked, “But how does knowing about Hezekiah and the 130 proverbs help me to be more like Jesus?” To see my reply, click here.
Good Question 