Fathers,Mothers,Sons,and Silence: Rhetorical Reconfiguration in Proverbs

Listen!: Paternal Invitation to Attentive Silence

In Proverbs, the silence that sounds, so to speak, the loudest, and which has received the most scholarly attention, emanates from the proverbial son, identified and addressed by the father figure in chapters 1–7. The father consistently relegates the son to a silent posture by exhorting the son to hear (1:8; 4:10 [4:1; 5:7; 7:24 in the plural]; 23:19, 22), to “accept my words” (2:1), to “make your ear attentive” (2:2), to “be attentive” (4:1, 20; 5:1), to “incline your ear” (4:20; 5:1), to “keep my words” (7:1), and to “be attentive to the words of my mouth” (7:24). With such imperatives, the father harness-es the world of words through the consistent call for the son to receive words aurally, rather than to speak. James Crenshaw names this rhetorical phenomenon the “missing voice” of the son, familiar in distinct wisdom traditions of the ancient Near East (1998: 187–203). In such cases, the addressee’s silence does not communicate so much as it provides the platform for the reception of a didactic monologue.

Indeed, the imperatives of the father vary in content but nimbly avoid overt invitations to speak, revealing caution or uncertainty in relation to the formative power of any speech other than that which the father himself offers. As Carol Newsom writes, Proverbs 1–9 as a whole does not “value” the interplay of distinctive discourses, but rather “seeks the hegemony of its own discourse” (147). In addition to the father’s directives to hear and listen, he does enjoin the son to take up constructive postures; to “treasure up my commands” (2:1), “inclining your heart to understanding” (2:2), to “walk in the way of the good” and “keep to the paths of the just” (2:20), to “not forget my teaching” and to “let your heart keep my commandments” (3:1), to “bind” “loyalty and faithfulness” to the neck and “write them on the tablet of your heart” (3:3), to “trust in the Lord” and “fear the Lord,” to “turn away from evil” (3:5–7), and so on. Such commands diverge from the dominant “hear!” of Proverbs 1–9, but still advocate dispositional and behavioral stances for the son without clear reference to his own capacity for speech.

Moreover, injunctions against speaking and against interactions with those who speak certain kinds of words pepper the father’s pedagogical discourse. In Proverbs 3:28, the father instructs the son not to speak: “Do not say to your neighbor, ‘Go, and come again, tomorrow I will give it’—when you have it with you.” He urges the son to “Put away from you crooked speech, and put devious talk far from you” and instead, to “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you” (Prov 4:24–25). The father here offers a kind of hierarchy of formation processes: not the mouth that speaks, but the eyes that see. Crenshaw contends that the sapiential vocabulary of education emphasizes seeing and hearing, and points to Egypt, where the sage was known as the “hearer” (1998: 283). Likewise, Greg Schmidt Goering shows that, while the book of Proverbs mentions seven senses (including speech and kinesthesia), the collection emphasizes the visual and aural senses in the formation of self. He points to “the ways in which the sages of Proverbs promulgated specific conventions for the appropriate uses of ears and eyes.” These ancient pedagogues create “protocols or strategies for regulation of seeing and hearing. These protocols for the shaping of vision and audition, which can be inferred from the text, form a sapiential scopic and auditory regime” (245). In other words, verbal activity is subordinated to other sensory strategies oriented towards the formation of self.

The caution evoked in imperatives not to speak also finds supporting expression in the father’s menacing description of the strange woman as one who lurks, grasps, kisses, and who speaks (Prov 7:12–13; cf. 5:3; 6:24). The father quotes the strange woman (7:14–20) who, as he argues, “persuades” young men with her “seductive speech” and “compels” with her “smooth talk” (7:21). The father once again enjoins his sons to “hear” (7:24) his own words as protection against the dangers associated with the strange woman’s speech (7:24–27). Such texts outline the life-giving and yet also death-dealing potentialities of speech, emphasizing yet again the trustworthiness of the father’s discourse against all others and cautiousness with respect to the verbal capacity of the son.

If You Call out: Paternal Invitation to Speech

The father’s second instruction (Prov 2:1–22) does include a rare directive to speak, using a conditional statement instead of an imperative. Initiating his instruction with the familiar commands to “accept my words” (v 1) and “make your ear attentive” (v 2), he addresses the son:

My child, if you accept my words

And treasure up my commandments within you,

Making your ear attentive to wisdom

And inclining your heart to understanding;

If you indeed cry out for insight,

And raise your voice for understanding;

If you seek it like silver,

And search for it as for hidden treasures—

Then you will understand the fear of the Lord

And find the knowledge of God [Prov 2:1–5].

This is an invitation to speech, of sorts, directed towards understanding and discernment. The phrase “raise your voice” (v 3) recalls Woman Wisdom, who similarly “raises her voice” in the public squares in Proverbs 1:20. The father invites the son to answer her, to step into relationship with Wisdom, using verbal terminology to denote this engagement (Waltke 2004: 221). Scholars note the pedagogical shift that these verses provoke. Bruce Waltke reads this as the move from “passive, receptive conditions” in vv 1–2 to “aggressive, initiative conditions” in vv 3–4 (2004: 221). Similarly, Michael Fox sees in vv 1–4 a progressive demarcation of the “learner’s task,” namely to take in the words of father, to “call” to wisdom, and to “seek” wisdom (1994: 237). Fox identifies here two “phases of education,” namely the “father’s teaching and its rote incorporation by the child” and the “learner’s own thought and inquiry.” He writes that, subsequent to these two pedagogical moments, “God steps into the picture and grants wisdom” such that “Education is thus a cooperative effort of child, parents, and God” (1994: 242).

The medium of the transition that such scholars note is speech, so long as the son properly directs his speech toward Wisdom. Verbal engagement, in this context, signifies a kind of personal seeking (bāqaš—v 4), an active engagement with Understanding (bînâ—v 3) and Discernment (tebûnâ—v 3), what Waltke calls personified “correlatives of wisdom” and indistinguishable from it (2004: 221–22). Such a quest-in-speech that leads to “knowledge of God” tends toward the protection of the son, who is thereby saved from “evil men” who “speak perversely” (v 12) and the forbidden woman “with her smooth words” (v 16). Speech here takes on a formative significance but is metaphorically configured. The father’s reference to the son’s voice expresses that “seeking” activity that might be concretely verbal or not and couched within negative language about the competing discourses of others so prevalent in the father’s instructions. In other words, the father does not here invite the son into human dialogue.

Proverbs 4:1–9 does include a kind of tacit summons to inter-human discourse but frames it as an intergenerational monologue. In verses 3–4, the father says:

When I was a son with my father,

tender, and my mother’s favorite,

He taught me, and said to me,

“Let your heart hold fast to my words;

keep my commandments, and live [Prov 4:3–4].

In the instruction that follows in verses 5–9, the substance of the lesson is a quotation of the father’s father. In other words, the pattern of speech is a repeated one, and the father says again the words once said to him. This foreshadows a further stage of his own silent son’s path to speech, namely, his eventual entry into the world of teaching. The will of the speaker is implicit but clear; the child should one day reinitiate the pedagogical address that his father now addresses to him.

Proverbs 23:15–16 repeats this sentiment, again as a statement rather than an imperative, which differentiates it from the conditionals in chapter 2. The text states:

My child, if your heart is wise,

My heart too will be glad.

My soul will rejoice

When your lips speak what is right [Prov 23:15–16].

Not only does the father anticipate the day when the son will speak rightly, but he rejoices in the thought of it.

Though distinctive, such invitations to speech (in chapters 2, 4, and 23) point toward clearly pedagogical goals and none includes an open imperative to verbally engage with, or on behalf of, another human being. Moreover, the verbal activity endorsed by the father tends toward the creating and sustaining of a repeated wisdom discourse within a generational context. Of the didactic program set forth in chapters 1–9, Christine Roy Yoder writes that, by chapter 9, the rhetorical effect of repetitive exhortations and motivation clauses means that “readers still engaging the text have so internalized the (parental) instruction that they may serve as teachers in their own right” (176). The silences eventually overcome by such speech on the son’s part are thus revealed as transitional, momentary verbal restraint oriented towards the pursuit of wisdom and ultimately its further conveyance.

Thus, the father’s words are one of the vessels through which wisdom is dispensed, while wordlessness (that is, the silent listening of the son) represents the appropriate posture for initiating and, to some degree, sustaining a wise life. As James Crenshaw writes, “The primary responsibility of students was to observe and listen, eye and ear uniting to convey knowledge to the mind for storage in the belly until released through the mouth” (1998: 209). Overall, the father exhorts the son in many ways, but does not emphasize the speaking faculty of the son as a primary formative tool but rather as the future mechanism for the son’s repetition of didactic discourse. The father does not promote any speech other than his own.

Speak Up!: Maternal Invitation to Just Words

Proverbs 31:1–9 shows us a Queen Mother entreating her son, Lemuel, to adhere to certain behaviors and attitudes during his reign. Though the role of mother-teacher receives several mentions throughout Proverbs (1:8; 6:20; cf. 23:22; 31:26), the mother-as-speaker occurs only here. Verse 1 states that she “taught” (yisserattu) Lemuel with the words that follow. Scholars note the uniqueness of this maternal teaching within the corpus of biblical texts traditionally associated with Israelite wisdom as well as other “royal instruction” texts of the ancient Near East (Crenshaw 1988: 21; Whybray: 422). The Queen Mother’s royal instruction to her son Lemuel in Proverbs 31:1–9 creates a rhetorical relationship that implies the same “listen!” that governs the speech of the father. While the queen issues no imperative to hear, her exclamatory vocatives in Proverbs 31:2 (“No, my son! No, son of my womb! No, son of my vows!”) clamor for her son’s attention. This seemingly anxious mother implores her son to exercise caution with regard to women and wine, while also to exercise liberality with the dispensing of strong drink to those who suffer in poverty and need to forget their troubles. The substance of these exhortations echoes other ancient Near Eastern texts that “consistently stress the social obligations of kings to champion the cause of widows and orphans” (Crenshaw 1988: 17). It is clear that this Queen Mother intends to instruct her listening son.

Such mandates, issuing from a parental speaker to her silent child, mirror the pedagogical relationship modeled by the father and son without displaying the same anxiety about words as such. Both rhetorical configurations present a silent listening, a silent attentiveness that allows the son to receive and understand the didactic words of the parent. However, in contrast with the father-teacher, the mother’s expectation of Lemuel’s wordless posture is accompanied by the concurrent expectation that he will step out of silence in the seemingly immediate future. Lemuel twice receives an invitation to speak from the mother:

Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute.

Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy [Prov 31:8–9].

This acknowledgement that the silent son must speak is distinctive in both its explicitness and its function. The command to speak is grammatically unique within the parent-child rhetorical context; the father never commands the son to speak with an imperative. Moreover, the imperatives that follow in v 9, namely to “judge righteously” and “defend the rights of the poor,” show that this repeated “speak up!” belongs to a rhetorical framework other than the one in which the mother and son presently engage. In other words, Lemuel’s mother directs him to a context beyond the pedagogical conferral of wisdom, that is, a context external to the rhetorical environment that is presented to us in the text of Prov 31:1–9. The words she demands are the words that enact justice, words that do something for someone other than Lemuel. Therefore, the mother’s imperatives direct the son outside of a pedagogical context while also introducing another player or players (the mute, the poor) into this newly imagined communicative environment.

The mother’s invitation, however, remains only an invitation, and a repeated one at that. This royal instruction begins with the superscription, “The words of Lemuel, king of Massa, which his mother taught him” (31:1, my translation; NRSV translates “The words of King Lemuel. An oracle that his mother taught him”). In other words, the teaching that follows more accurately presents Lemuel’s repetition of the words that his mother once spoke to him. The text thus offers a layered rhetorical context in which the mother-son relationship belongs to the annals of Lemuel’s memory as he reiterates her instruction to those who might encounter his reprisal. Indeed, in Lemuel, we see something of a realization of the father’s hopes with regard to the transmission of didactic speech, but with a caveat. On the one hand, Lemuel seems to repeat the wise admonitions of his mother; on the other hand, she (and he thereby) calls for an as-yet-uncalled-for kind of speech on behalf of the vulnerable, that is, non-pedagogical speech within the context of the royal house.

Silenced: The Ever-Wordless Poor

Indeed, the royal mother’s “open your mouth!” directs Lem uel to speech on behalf of the “mute” (’illem—30:8). This term describes a non-verbal reality of some kind, introducing another kind of silence into the communicative environment presented in Proverbs 31:1–9. This silence, unlike that of the listening Lemuel who eventually repeats the words of his mother, never breaks.

The term ’illem occurs only once in Proverbs and functions in different ways in its other appearances throughout the canon. It can denote a permanent state; Habakkuk 2:18 uses the adjectival form to describe the inherent futility of idols, while Exodus 4:11 (“Then the Lord said to him, ‘Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?’”) also suggests a fixed condition. Often, however, occurrences of the term indicate a temporary wordlessness associated with the suffering of the present. For example, Isaiah uses the adjectival form to offer a message of salvation by imagining passage out of silence. The prophet states that “the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy,” painting his vision of hope in verbal terms (Is 35:6). Psalm 39 likewise sketches a transitional silence using the term to denote the supplicant’s passionate yet unsuccessful attempt to hold his peace, revealing a momentary rather than constitutive silence (3–4, 10). Other occurrences of the term similarly suggest a transient function; its threefold use to describe the muteness imposed on Ezekiel and then lifted by God, who opens the prophet’s mouth, emphasizes the ephemerality of the prophet’s speechlessness (3:26, 24:27, 33:22).

Whether chosen or imposed, this kind of temporary silence is often paired with the term “to open,” (pātaḥ) as the mouth gets opened either by God, as in Ezekiel, or by the silent character himself, as in Daniel 10:16. In his seminal study The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz, André Neher writes that the term refers not to one “who, despite his willingness and the conscientious effort of his whole being, is not able to formulate a single word,” but rather one who “has had his tongue tied as one ties up a sheaf of corn” (45). Neher plays here on the niphal (be dumb—Is 53:7; Ez 3:26, 24:27, 33:22; Ps 31:19, 39:3, 39:10; Dan 10:15) and piel (to bind—Gen 37:7) meanings of the verb. He writes further that the term implies that the tongue of the ’illem may “be unbound (a moment indicated by the term patah, ‘to open, handle a door’)” and that this person may choose to bind and unbind the tongue himself or herself (45).

In Proverbs 31:8–9, the mouth that opens, or that is commanded to open, does not belong to the ’illem/mute, but rather to King Lemuel. Here, the ’illem represents a group whose tongue, so to speak, remains tied up, irrevocably silent, completely reliant on the gracious speech of another. Crenshaw concludes that the term “embraces actual dumbness as well as silence resulting from a disadvantaged social position” (1988: 18). Here, the permanent character of this group’s silence relates to its social status. In v 8, the term ’illem stands parallel to the rather mysterious benê ḥlop (qal infinitive absolute), literally “those passing away” or “vanishing.” Michael V. Fox points out that, while this latter term could include all humans in the verse, such a reading would mean that the mother is exhorting Lemuel to speak for everyone, which makes little sense. Fox suggests instead that the term refers to those “perishing,” that is, those facing death due to “starvation” or “persecution” (2009: 888). The legal imperatives of v 9, to “judge” and “execute justice” for the “poor and the needy” suggest that the speechless here are those with no voice within the context of the court, or the most vulnerable of society.

Silence, within this context, functions constitutively rather than as a precursor to speech. In a contemporary study on the rhetoric of silence, Cheryl Glenn describes the function of silence within the context of powerlessness in the social sphere. She writes:

The dominant group in a social hierarchy renders “inarticulate” subordinate or muted groups (any of the traditionally disenfranchised) and excludes them from the formulation, validation, and circulation of meaning. Thus, the inability to speak fluently in certain social interactions can indicate mutedness, and silence itself becomes the language of the powerless [25].

Proverbs 31:8–9 suggests something along these lines with respect to the silent poor. “Muteness,” in this passage, signifies a temporary state only insofar as the voice of the king relieves it. The silence remains permanent, however, as a constitutive dimension of the social identity of the ’illem; they cannot speak for themselves. Timothy J. Sandoval identifies Proverbs 31:8–9 as one of several texts that comprise what he calls the collection’s “sub-discourse on social justice.” It includes two of the three terms he links with this sub-discourse (including the “poor” and the “needy”), terms that he contends signify the poor as “exclusively grammatical objects acted upon (rather than active subjects)” (207). The lack of potential for verbal agency afforded this social group in Proverbs 31 no doubt supports Sandoval’s understanding. Such silence “speaks” only insofar as it must be noticed (or heard) by the king if the mute/poor are to receive justice due to his words. Because of this, the mother’s command to advocate for the vulnerable introduces the idea that speech can enact justice, and she introduces it into the rhetorical framework of parent-child instruction in a way that the father’s exhortations do not.

Conclusion

Placed in the final chapter of a diverse wisdom collection (in the MT), these exhortations for Lemuel to speak the words of advocacy represent a kind of culminating and yet contrastive rhetorical moment, preceded by so many cautions regarding the verbal agency of the pedagogical audience. The Queen Mother’s explicit invitation into the world of words, the art of becoming a wise and just speaker, presupposes a framework of verbal restraint, and a high valuation of different forms of wise silence; the silence that hears (1:8), the silence that avoids violent speech (10:11), the silence that spares superfluous words (10:19), the silence of concealing knowledge (12:23), the silence of slowness (29:20). The emphasis on silence, so diversely elaborated, provides the context for entrance into speech. Yet, the entrance offered in Proverbs 31 diverges from the pedagogical invitations favored by the proverbial father. In this final chapter, the imperative to speak extends beyond the familial proliferation of wise discourse into the social domain of advocacy. Appropriate speech on behalf of another grows out of appropriate verbal restraint, and it is precisely the cultivation of a “hearing ear” that would allow a king such as Lemuel to “listen” to the unspeaking poor and subsequently offer his voice in their service.

This passage simultaneously accentuates the lack of verbal agency afforded those whose silence marks their social status. Rather than functioning as a precursor to speech, as an integral moment of the rhetorical matrix that makes meaning in the communicative world of Proverbs, the wordlessness of the poor demarcates an on-going reality in which, as R.N. Whybray writes, “their poverty is taken for granted” (208). We are left with the uncomfortable notion that the invitation to speech belongs only to some. The silenced and vulnerable poor have no choice but to await the word of another.

Of course, another silence emerges from these verses in that Lemuel himself remains ever the recipient of these maternal exhortations without fulfilling them. The text offers us only his apparent repetition of the teaching of his mother, that is, the recurrence of an intergenerational didactic discourse. We never hear him enacting justice through verbal advocacy, as the text turns instead to a description of the Woman of Strength, who takes care of the poor (31:20) and speaks the words of didactic wisdom herself (31:26). Jürgen Ebach writes that “In all forms of silence ‘scripture’ is left with the oxymoron that silence is made to speak, and that it itself expresses something” (104). Here, the silence of the text expresses its own kind of invitation to those who would heed the Queen Mother’s urgent commands.