Folly is an unruly woman; she is simple and knows nothing. – Proverbs 9:13

Today’s Scripture Reading (September 28, 2019): Proverbs 9

As an older person, I have watched language change. And sometimes, I admit that I am still trapped by those changes. Sometimes I say things I don’t really mean because language has changed. Slang speech of my youth has become offensive. (Or more appropriately, it was always offensive, but in the past we didn’t recognize the offensiveness of our words.) I live in a world where saying anything in a negative way about a segment of our society is not acceptable. I freely admit that I am not sure that when we used the phrase to “Jew someone down” in a price negotiation, we always realized that that was actually a slur against Hebrew people. Or that when we called something stupid, saying it was “gay,” that we were connecting that stupid incident with the LGBTQ community. We should have understood that, but I don’t think that we did. And so sometimes those archaic slangs still creep into our dialogue. We don’t mean what we say, and sometimes that is why it is hard to change our speech patterns.

I think sometimes the language of the Bible also interferes with our understanding of what it is saying. We don’t have a problem with Solomon comparing the positive aspects of Wisdom to a “lady of quality” early in this passage, but when he turns to his description of folly, somehow his complaint feels a little like an unacceptable, stereotypical description of a lower class female. “Folly is an unruly woman.”

It gets worse. A better translation of Solomon’s meaning here might be that “folly is a loud, unruly woman, calling out into the street; she is simple (maybe stupid) and knows nothing.” But Solomon is trying to give us an illustration of his truth, using a stereotype with which he believed that his audience would be able to identify.

Today, it would be better to get rid of the stereotype altogether and understand that Folly is often loud an unruly. Folly will clamor to get your attention, but once you begin to pay attention to it, folly has nothing to offer you.

Or maybe we just need to steal the words of Shakespeare from “Macbeth.” Folly “is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 10