Tonight we begin the book of Proverbs and as we have customarily do, we will kick it off with an overview of the book.

The word Proverbs means an object lesson based on or using a comparison or an analogy. So it’s similar in function and purpose to a parable, but in many ways they differ.

Proverbs is a poetic work. This would be easy to miss since Hebrew poetry does not rely upon rhyme & Meter as it does in most languages. Furthermore, being a translation into English all of that would have been lost anyway, which may be one of the contributing reasons why God had the Old Testament largely written in Hebrew. In the end, nothing is lost in translation!

Hebrew poetry relies heavily upon a thing called Parallelism which takes several forms which we introduced tonight.

Other facts we covered include:
• Proverbs is a compiled work of poetic, wisdom literature.
• It was pieced together over at very least 300 years.
• It has at very least 2 contributing authors, though likely considerably more.
• It is divided into 3 to 7 sections, only 4 of which we will recognize.
• It contains seven major forms – short potent statements for contemplation and meditation, stories, sayings, parental advice, moral discourses, concept personifications and an oracle.

I hope you will get something out of this introduction to Proverbs which will help you in your future studies and enjoyment of the book. Also, we hope that you will join us as we traverse Proverbs over the course of the next several months.