Panel essay · Proverbs & Ecclesiastes · September 7–13, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
Most weeks of Come, Follow Me, the hard questions have to be imported. This week they are already in the reading. Proverbs makes very specific promises about how life works; Ecclesiastes, printed on the next page, says the promises do not reliably hold. The manual notices and says the two books "look at life from different perspectives" but "teach similar truths." Another way to say it is that the canon preserved an argument and declined to settle it. What follows is a survey of where readers actually get stuck in these thirteen chapters — including places where the Church's own study materials concede more than most members realize.
Read Proverbs 3 straight through and count the guarantees. "Length of days, and long life, and peace, shall they add to thee" (3:2). "Honour the Lord with thy substance ... so shall thy barns be filled with plenty" (3:9–10). "When thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid" (3:24). Proverbs 22:4 is blunter: "By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches, and honour, and life." Proverbs 16:7 promises that a righteous man's enemies will be made "to be at peace with him." Proverbs 2:21–22 says the upright will "dwell in the land" and the wicked "shall be cut off from the earth."
This is prosperity theology with a Hebrew accent. The standard faithful defense is that a proverb is a genre — a compressed generalization about how the world usually runs, not a contract — and that defense is almost certainly right as literary description. It is also expensive, because it leaves the reader deciding verse by verse which promises are load-bearing and which are proverbial exaggeration, on criteria the book never supplies.
The sharpest case is Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." For Latter-day Saints this verse is not merely biblical. Lehi quotes it, nearly word for word, in his dying blessing: "I know that if ye are brought up in the way ye should go ye will not depart from it" (2 Nephi 4:5). And Lehi immediately hedges it — the next verse contemplates his grandchildren being cursed anyway, with the cursing "answered upon the heads of your parents" (2 Nephi 4:6). The verse arrives in Restoration scripture already under strain.
Anyone who has sat with a parent whose adult child has left knows what this verse does in a Latter-day Saint home: it converts grief into self-indictment. Elder David A. Bednar addressed exactly that pain in "Faithful Parents and Wayward Children," and his answer is worth reading carefully, because it declines the easy comfort. Taking up the widely circulated statements attributed to Joseph Smith and to Elder Orson F. Whitney about sealed parents securing their posterity, he argues that popular interpretations of them have "contributed to a measure of doctrinal misunderstanding," and that righteous parental influence "does not overrule the consequences of the unrighteous exercise of moral agency" and "does not negate the responsibility of an individual as an agent." That is honest. It also leaves Proverbs 22:6 standing there, unqualified, in the King James text the manual assigns.
Ecclesiastes is arguably the Bible's own rebuttal. The Preacher watches the wise man and the fool die the same death (2:14–16), watches a man's life work pass to an heir who may be a fool (2:18–21), and finds that "in the place of judgment, that wickedness was there" (3:16). Which is reassuring — scripture anticipated the objection — and unsettling, because it means two canonical books give opposite descriptions of the same world, and the reader is left to arbitrate.
Proverbs 22:15 is in this week's block: "Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." Its companions are not — 13:24 ("He that spareth his rod hateth his son") and 23:13–14, which tells a father to beat his son with a rod and promises it will "deliver his soul from hell." These verses have been used, in and out of the Church, to justify hitting children, and pretending otherwise is not honesty.
The Church's own 2026 Scripture Helps for this week flags the verse and answers it directly: these passages "are best understood as figurative expressions emphasizing the importance of loving and consistent discipline," and "should not be used as a justification for physical abuse," citing the family proclamation and Doctrine and Covenants 121:41–45. The Church's topical page on abuse says flatly that abuse "cannot be tolerated in any form." The empirical picture is not ambiguous either: Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor's 2016 meta-analysis, covering 111 effect sizes and roughly 161,000 children, found spanking associated with detrimental outcomes on thirteen of seventeen measures and none in the beneficial direction.
The institutional and empirical answers are clear, then. The interpretive problem is narrower and remains: whether "the rod of correction" was originally a metaphor is a historical question, not a devotional one, and the material in Proverbs 23 does not read metaphorically. Readers land in three places. Some treat the sayings as culturally conditioned pedagogy for adolescents rather than small children; some hold that the principle — correction is love — survives while the method does not; some conclude the text is simply wrong here and find that saying so costs them nothing. The manual's answer is the second. It is worth knowing that it is a reading, not a translation.
The manual gives Proverbs 31:10–31 its own section, headed "A woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised," and invites readers to summarize each verse and ask "Which of these traits can you emulate?" For many women this is the passage that has cost them the most. Read as a job description — she buys real estate, runs a textile business, feeds her household before dawn, and her candle "goeth not out by night" (31:16, 24, 15, 18) — it is a machine for manufacturing inadequacy.
Two facts change the reading, and both come from the Church's own materials. The Bible Dictionary notes that Proverbs 30–31 are not Solomon's at all but "the 'burden' of Agur and Lemuel," and that the Lemuel section is "arranged in acrostic form." The Scripture Helps go further: the poem's twenty-two verses each begin with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the King James "virtuous woman" of 31:10 would be better rendered "capable woman" or "woman of strength." An alphabetic poem is a rhetorical form — a completeness device, an A-to-Z — not a checklist. And the Scripture Helps concede that of King Lemuel "it is not known whether Lemuel was an actual person or a literary creation." The chapter is a wisdom idealization, spoken by a queen mother to a son, in an economy where a household was a production unit.
That reframing helps. It does not dissolve the harder question, which is who the book is speaking to. The instruction chapters address a son, over and over — "My son, hear the instruction of thy father" (1:8), and again at 1:10, 2:1, 3:1, 3:11, 3:21, 4:10, 4:20 — and even Lemuel's mother opens with "What, my son? and what, the son of my womb?" (31:2). Women appear as figures the son must sort: Lady Wisdom crying in the streets (1:20–21), and against her the "strange woman" of 2:16–19, whose "house inclineth unto death," and the "strange women" of 22:14, a "deep pit." The Church's Scripture Helps identify her as the adulteress and describe her as the deliberate foil to personified Wisdom. Both poles are female; the reader is assumed male. Michael V. Fox's Anchor Yale volume on Proverbs 1–9 devotes extended essays to how personified Wisdom came to be figured this way. A reader can find the arrangement historically intelligible and still notice that a woman reading Proverbs 31 is reading a description of herself written for someone else's use.
Proverbs 1:1 says "the proverbs of Solomon"; Ecclesiastes 1:1 says "the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." Almost no critical scholar thinks Solomon wrote either book in the form we have it.
For Ecclesiastes the argument is linguistic and hard to wave off. C. L. Seow's study in the Journal of Biblical Literature and his Anchor Bible commentary date the book's Hebrew to the Persian period — roughly the second half of the fifth through the first half of the fourth century BCE — on grammar, vocabulary, and loanwords. One of the exhibits sits inside this week's reading: Ecclesiastes 2:5, "I made me gardens and orchards." The word behind "orchards" is pardes, a Persian loanword (it is the ancestor of English paradise). Persia was not a lending culture for Hebrew in the tenth century BCE.
What is striking is how little the Church's materials resist this. The Bible Dictionary entry on Ecclesiastes never says Solomon wrote it; it says only that "the author describes himself as 'son of David, king in Jerusalem.'" The Scripture Helps say the Preacher "is traditionally thought to be King Solomon." On Proverbs the Scripture Helps are more direct: while many sayings are attributed to Solomon, "the book of Proverbs can be seen as a library of Israelite wisdom literature that was collected over several centuries." That is the scholarly position, printed on churchofjesuschrist.org.
The live question for a Latter-day Saint is what happens to trust when an attribution turns out to be a genre convention rather than a claim of fact. Kevin L. Barney's much-cited Dialogue essay on the Documentary Hypothesis is one careful model for holding both — accepting the compositional evidence without treating it as a verdict on inspiration. Others reach for the eighth article of faith, or note that pseudonymous royal attribution was a normal ancient practice that deceived no one at the time. And some readers find that once one attribution goes, they cannot say in advance which others will.
The parallel that unsettles people online is real, and it lands inside this week's block. Proverbs 22:17 begins a distinct unit — "Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise" — that runs to 24:22 and reads, in stretches, like an adaptation of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, a father-to-son wisdom text commonly dated well before the likely date of the Proverbs collection. E. A. Wallis Budge published the papyrus in 1923; Adolf Erman's 1924 study laid out the correspondences, densest in Proverbs 22:17–23:11.
The detail worth knowing is Proverbs 22:20, which the KJV renders "Have not I written to thee excellent things in counsels and knowledge." The Hebrew word behind "excellent things" is odd, and Erman proposed reading it as sheloshim, "thirty." Amenemope is explicitly organized into thirty chapters and tells its reader to look to them. Modern translations generally follow the emendation: "thirty sayings."
The range of explanations is wider than either side of the online argument admits. Most scholars accept literary dependence and read the Hebrew writer as adapting Egyptian material into a Yahwistic frame. R. N. Whybray questioned whether the resemblances exceed what shared moral commonplaces would produce; John Ruffle's 1977 Tyndale Bulletin study argued against direct dependence; J. A. Emerton and Nili Shupak have answered the skeptics. Faithful readers have taken all of it in stride: Fox's commentary treats Egyptian parallels as ordinary context, and the Church's own description of Proverbs as a centuries-long anthology of Israelite wisdom does not require the material to have originated in Israel. "The Bible copied Egypt" turns out to be a compressed version of something the Church's own manual has partly said already. Whether inspiration can run through an editor who selects and reframes a neighbor's proverbs is the real question, and it is theological, not archaeological.
Ecclesiastes 3:19–21 is the passage that stops Latter-day Saint readers cold. "That which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts ... a man hath no preeminence above a beast." Then: "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" Alongside 1:9 ("no new thing under the sun"), 2:16 ("how dieth the wise man? as the fool"), and 9:5 just outside the block, these are among the verses most often quoted back at believers.
The Bible Dictionary's answer is the "under the sun" reading: the phrase means "from a worldly point of view," so 9:5 and 9:10 are "observations by the Preacher about how things appear to men on the earth," not "theological pronouncements on the condition of the soul after death." That is a coherent reading and it is the Church's official one. It is worth being clear that it is an interpretive frame imposed on the text, not something the text announces about itself — and that 3:21 is not a denial but a question, which is a different and in some ways more honest thing.
Then there is the ending. Ecclesiastes 12:13–14 arrives like a supervisor: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." The manual leans on it hard. But the Church's own Scripture Helps carry this footnote: "Many scholars believe that verses 9–14 in Ecclesiastes 12 were a later addition to Ecclesiastes," citing Robert Alter's translation. If that is right, the tidy conclusion is a later hand domesticating a dangerous book — which is either evidence that the community of faith knew what to do with Qohelet, or evidence that someone could not leave it alone.
Two things sit oddly against all this. Alma 40:11 answers Ecclesiastes 3:21's question in the very vocabulary of Ecclesiastes 12:7 — the spirits of all men "are taken home to that God who gave them life" — and grounds the answer in something Qohelet never claimed: "it has been made known unto me by an angel." And Alma 37:35, "O, remember, my son, and learn wisdom in thy youth," is Ecclesiastes 12:1 with the serial numbers barely filed off. Jane Allis-Pike's study of Alma 36–39 against Proverbs 1–9, published by BYU's Religious Studies Center and cited in the Church's own Scripture Helps this week, argues that Alma's counsel to his sons runs on the wisdom tradition's rails throughout.
None of that resolves anything above. It does suggest the Restoration did not treat these books as adversaries to be managed but as material to think with — which is a workable model for the week. The question is not which book wins. It is that scripture kept both, and left the reader in the room with the argument.