Panel essay · Proverbs & Ecclesiastes · September 7–13, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
The Come, Follow Me manual notices something real: Proverbs says seek wisdom and life goes well; Ecclesiastes "seems to say, 'It's not that simple.'" That is the correct instinct, and it is worth pressing further than a lesson outline can. These two books are not two moods of one author. They are two literary deposits, in two different stages of the Hebrew language, from two different centuries, bound together in a canon that was still being argued over in the second century of the common era. Reading them that way does not diminish them. It is the only way the tension the manual noticed can be taken seriously rather than smoothed.
Proverbs 1:1 reads "The proverbs of Solomon the son of David, king of Israel." Read as a title page for the whole book, that is a claim of authorship. Read as what it is — the heading of the first of several collections — it is a claim about one section. The book itself supplies the other headings: a second "proverbs of Solomon" at 10:1, "the words of the wise" at 22:17 (mid-chapter, in this week's reading), another at 24:23, "the words of Agur" at 30:1, and "the words of king Lemuel" at 31:1. Most decisive is 25:1, which introduces further Solomonic material "which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out" — an internal claim that the book was still being assembled roughly two and a half centuries after Solomon. Bruce Waltke's two-volume NICOT commentary — the fullest English-language treatment of the book — organizes its introduction around exactly these questions of text, structure, and authorship. Michael J. Biggerstaff, writing for BYU's Religious Studies Center, describes Proverbs as an anthology drawn from Hebrew and foreign sources over many generations ("The Wisdom of Proverbs," in From Wilderness to Monarchy, 2025); Jane Allis-Pike, also writing for the Religious Studies Center, observes that the sayings in Proverbs 1–9 are not generally thought to be personal to Solomon or his own children, and that the collection was likely not compiled until centuries after him. This is not a concession wrung from the text; it is the text's own account of itself.
Proverbs 31:1 is a further complication that the KJV hides. "The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him" renders Hebrew maśśā', which can mean "oracle" or can be the proper name Massa, an Ishmaelite clan (Genesis 25:14). If the latter, then the canonical book of Proverbs closes with the instruction of a foreign queen mother to a foreign king. Israel's wisdom tradition was internationally aware and said so.
Ecclesiastes 1:1 is more careful still: "the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." Solomon is never named. Qohelet — the word behind "Preacher" — is a feminine participle from a root meaning to assemble; the Church's own curriculum, citing the Bible Dictionary, glosses it as "one who convenes an assembly." And 1:12 says "I was king over Israel in Jerusalem" — a retrospective that fits an author adopting a Solomonic persona better than it fits Solomon, who died on the throne. The Church's seminary teacher material is candid on this point: "Little is known about the writer of Ecclesiastes beyond his own description of himself," and "It is not clear when or where this book was written." That is a more accurate statement than most Sunday School treatments of the book, and Latter-day Saints have no doctrinal stake requiring more.
At Proverbs 22:17 a new unit begins mid-chapter — "Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise" — and what follows is among the most consequential material in the study of Israelite wisdom. In 1924 the Egyptologist Adolf Erman published a list of correspondences between Proverbs and the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, concentrated in Proverbs 22:17–23:11; Hugo Gressmann extended the parallel section to 24:22 that same year. The hinge is 22:20, which the KJV renders "Have not I written to thee excellent things." The Hebrew šilšôm is difficult; Erman proposed reading šelōšîm, "thirty" — matching the thirty numbered chapters of Amenemope. Michael V. Fox gives sustained attention to Egyptian comparanda throughout Proverbs 10–31 (Anchor Yale Bible, 2009).
The emendation is not universally accepted. Bernd U. Schipper, who has worked extensively on the Egyptian material, argues that the Hebrew of 22:20 makes sense as written and that the temporal language ("today," "formerly") fits Egyptian scribal practice, so the "thirty" reading is unnecessary. The relationship's mechanism remains debated. But the fact of a substantive literary relationship between an Israelite wisdom collection and an Egyptian instruction is not seriously in doubt, and for a Latter-day Saint reader it should be less unsettling than for almost anyone else. Restoration scripture is explicit that God grants to all nations to teach his word (Alma 29:8), and rebukes the assumption that revelation belongs to one people (2 Nephi 29:11–12). A Judahite scribe reworking Egyptian instruction into Yahwistic counsel — "That thy trust may be in the Lord, I have made known to thee this day" (Proverbs 22:19) — is doing something a Restoration theology of scripture has room for.
Proverbs 1:20–33 does something the surrounding material does not. Wisdom stops being an object and becomes a speaker. She "crieth without," takes her stand "in the openings of the gates," and delivers a first-person oracle. Her idiom is prophetic and, more startling, divine: "I will pour out my spirit unto you, I will make known my words unto you" (1:23), followed by the classic rejection formula — "Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded" (1:24). At 3:19–20 she is instrumental in creation: "The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth"; at 3:18 she is "a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her."
Three readings compete. Fox, in Proverbs 1–9 (Anchor Yale Bible, 2000), which includes an extended essay on the origins of personified wisdom, treats her primarily as a literary personification — a rhetorically powerful figure who does not amount to an independent divine entity. Claudia V. Camp, in Wisdom and the Feminine in the Book of Proverbs (Almond Press, 1985), reads the figure as growing out of the actual social roles of Israelite women. A third line reads her as a domesticated memory of a goddess, pointing to the eighth-century inscriptions from Kuntillet 'Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom that bless by "YHWH and his asherah" — though whether 'ăšērāh there names the goddess or her cult object remains contested.
This is where Latter-day Saint scholarship has actually engaged, and where honesty requires care. Daniel C. Peterson's "Nephi and His Asherah" (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9/2, 2000) argues that the tree in Nephi's vision, glossed by the angel with an image of the virgin mother (1 Nephi 11), draws on the Asherah-tree association attested in pre-exilic Israel. Samuel Zinner's "'Zion' and 'Jerusalem' as Lady Wisdom in Moses 7 and Nephi's Tree of Life Vision" (Interpreter 12, 2014) extends the argument into Lady Wisdom traditions across Second Temple and later Jewish literature. Latter-day Saints have a doctrinal Heavenly Mother, which makes this material live for them in a way it is not for most Protestant readers. But two cautions are earned. First, these are minority proposals inside LDS scholarship, not settled results, and the Asherah-to-Nephi line is contested on both the archaeological and the literary end. Second, Proverbs itself does not present Wisdom as anyone's consort. She is God's instrument and, in chapter 8, his delight — not his wife. Reading a Restoration doctrine backward into Proverbs 1 and 3 is a category error even when the Restoration doctrine is true.
Ecclesiastes brackets itself: "Vanity of vanities... all is vanity" at 1:2, repeated verbatim at 12:8. The word is hevel, whose concrete sense is vapor or breath — the same word that names Abel in Genesis 4. "Vanity" was a defensible 1611 gloss, when the English word meant emptiness rather than conceit; four centuries later it misfires. Fox, arguing from Camus, proposed "absurd," in the sense of counter-rational — a mismatch between what reason expects and what happens (A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up, Eerdmans, 1999). Choon-Leong Seow keeps "vanity" but glosses it toward the insubstantial and fleeting (Ecclesiastes, Anchor Bible, 1997). Others prefer "breath," "fleeting," "enigma."
The distinction is not pedantic. Ecclesiastes 11:10 says "childhood and youth are vanity." As "unimportant" that is nearly obscene; as "fleeting" it is simply true, and it is the ground for the exhortation two verses earlier to rejoice in one's youth (11:9). The manual's parenthetical gloss — "temporary and often unimportant" — gets the first half right and adds a second half the Hebrew will not carry. Qohelet does not say the world is unimportant. He says it will not hold still.
The Hebrew of Ecclesiastes is late. The relative particle še- has largely displaced 'ăšer; two Persian loanwords appear, pardēs at 2:5 (KJV "orchards," and the ancestor of "paradise") and pitgām at 8:11. There is no clear evidence of Persianisms in Hebrew before the Achaemenid period. Seow, in the Anchor Bible commentary and in "Linguistic Evidence and the Dating of Qohelet" (JBL 115, 1996, 643–66), places the book in the Persian period — roughly the late fifth through the first half of the fourth century BCE. Others push into the Hellenistic era. Nobody working on the language places it in the tenth century. Solomonic authorship of Ecclesiastes is a linguistic impossibility, and — again — nothing in Latter-day Saint doctrine requires it.
The end of the book raises a second question. At 12:8 the opening motto returns and Qohelet's first-person voice stops. At 12:9 someone else talks about him in the third person: "because the preacher was wise, he still taught the people knowledge." Older criticism read 12:9–14 as one or two later hands correcting a dangerous book — and 12:13's "Fear God, and keep his commandments" does read like a guardrail. Fox argued in "Frame-Narrative and Composition in the Book of Qohelet" (HUCA 48, 1977, 83–106) that the frame is authorial: a single writer deliberately playing voices against each other. Tremper Longman III builds his NICOT commentary (The Book of Ecclesiastes, Eerdmans, 1998) around a frame narrator who introduces Qohelet and then evaluates him. Either way, the verse the manual leans on is spoken by a voice that is not Qohelet's. It is a reader's verdict on the book, embedded in the book — which is a more interesting thing than a summary, and worth saying out loud in a class.
The canon itself stayed unsettled. Mishnah Yadayim 3:5 preserves the dispute over whether Ecclesiastes "defiles the hands," with the school of Shammai denying it and the school of Hillel affirming it, resolved only by appeal to a tradition from the assembled elders. Latter-day Saints, of all readers, should find this legible: an open canon means canonicity is an adjudicated category, and Doctrine and Covenants 91 is a Restoration instance of exactly that adjudication over the Apocrypha.
Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic: twenty-two lines, each opening with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. That is a formal, composed, self-consciously artificial poem — not observational advice. The KJV's "virtuous woman" translates 'ēšet ḥayil, and ḥayil is a martial and economic word: force, valor, capability, wealth. A gibbôr ḥayil is a warrior. Al Wolters, in The Song of the Valiant Woman (Paternoster, 2001), reads the poem form-critically as a heroic hymn, comparable in structure to the Song of Deborah.
Read that way, what the poem actually praises snaps into focus. She evaluates a field and buys it (31:16). She runs a textile operation and sells to merchants (31:24). She provisions her household like trading ships (31:14). Her husband's standing "in the gates" (31:23) is presented as downstream of her competence. The poem's own closing instruction is not that she be emulated but that she be paid and publicly credited: "Give her of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gates" (31:31). In Jewish practice it is sung at the Friday night table, a custom the seventeenth-century kabbalists initiated — praise offered, not a standard imposed. The lesson's prompt ("Which of these traits can you emulate?") converts a hymn into a performance review. The genre will not bear it.
Ecclesiastes 12:1–7 is an allegory of aging — trembling arms, failing teeth, dimming eyes, the almond tree white, the grasshopper a burden — ending with "the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it" (12:7). Latter-day Saints regularly cite this for premortal existence: we cannot return where we have not been. Dana M. Pike, in "The 'Spirit' That Returns to God in Ecclesiastes 12:7" (Let Us Reason Together, RSC, 2016), argues that the Hebrew rûaḥ here means life-breath, not an individual spirit personage, and that the verse does not teach the doctrine it is enlisted for. The reading has the book's own usage behind it: at Ecclesiastes 3:19 humans and animals "have all one breath" — the same rûaḥ — and 3:21 asks, without answering, who knows whether it goes up or down. Pike is a believing Latter-day Saint making a philological argument that cuts against a beloved proof-text. That is what serious scholarship inside a faith tradition looks like, and it should not be treated as an attack.
The tension the manual named is real, and it does not resolve. Proverbs 3:6 promises "he shall direct thy paths." Ecclesiastes 3:11 says God "hath set ha'ōlām in their heart" — "world" in the KJV, "eternity" in most modern versions, "ignorance" in a few, the ambiguity itself part of the point — "so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end." Both are canon. The compilers who put them in the same scroll knew what they were doing.