Out with the old, in with the young?
From UkrainianBible
I doubt that my classmate ever forgave me for what I did to him in Hebrew class one day. We were working on Proverbs 5:18, which says in both the King James and the N.I.V. that one should "rejoice in the wife of your youth."
He was leading the class, and it was his job to explain: What does that mean in ordinary English?
Ray said "You should rejoice with your wife while she's young."
My hand shot up. "I reject that interpretation. I think it means you should rejoice with the wife you married WHEN you were young, instead of trading your 50-year-old wife for two 25-year-olds!"
After the laugh-explosion--this was a seminary, after all-- everyone adopted my interpretation.
The book of Proverbs is the distilled and inspired wisdom of a people that honored wisdom above all else. Other nations boast of the beauty of their young women; Jews boast of the wisdom of their old men. The book of Proverbs isn't something that you read through once in your life so that you can say you've finally read the Bible through. One Bible-reading program I saw recommends that--since there are 31 chapters--you read through one chapter a day, and start over every month. Or read it once a year and memorize what you've underlined.
Not a bad idea, since the way Proverbs was originally used was the way we use the wise sayings of Ben Franklin. You know: "The early bird gets the beer bottles," "Never put off till tomorrow what you can postpone till the day after," and "This is the day the Lord hath made. Let's not louse it up."
Biblical proverbs were memorized and quoted in all applicable situations. They were thought about while doing manual labor. They programmed the young so that they would act in certain ways. Some of them are paradoxical or hard to understand, and would have been discussed at length around the campfire after the day's work was done. (I almost said "supper table," but a simple table has been an unaffordable luxury for most of the world's people throughout most of the world's history--it still is, in much of the rural Third World.)
What's so wise about saying "Rejoice with your wife while she's young"? This is worth ink, paper and memorization for 3,000 years? Nah! Since there are various possible translations of "wife of your youth," we need to pick the one that's wisest. If you have a wiser interpretation, please tell me.
We also have to go beyond the literal. What does "Rejoice" mean? Not enough for our purposes! When it's appropriate, of course you'll rejoice. New jobs. Raises. Holidays. Anniversaries. New homes. Birth of a child, baptisms, confirmations, gradauations, weddings... of course you'll rejoice, even without a commandment. Let's try for a synonym that's actually useful, and translate it this way: Rejoice means what: Make merry? Celebrate? How about....
"BE HAPPY WITH the wife who you married when you were both younger."
Be happy with--that is, rejoice AND be satisfied with her. Don't expect more. Don't go comparing her to other women, especially not the ones you see in mass media who can afford to spend hours in the beauty parlor before they ever get in front of a camera. Realize that we should control all our appetites--for food, drink, sex and even golf--and be moderate in all things. We should try to be less unattractive to our wives (it helps to keep off the pounds, try to give up smoking, comb our hair the first thing in the morning and even shave on our days off). If she's got a few gray hairs, you're the one who gave them to her, and if she has a few faults, remember: They're the reason she figured she couldn't get a better husband than you.
Other things that help: I've been out of America a dozen years and maybe the new statistics are different, but the last I knew, excessive debt was a factor in 90% of divorces, so discipline your spending. I'd suggest visiting to help you get out of debt if your credit cards are hard to control.
And there was this interesting graph I remember. It was roughly like an X. The line that went up from left to right was "Number of days per year the Bible was used, including worship services and home Bible reading." As it went up from zero to 365, there was another line that slanted directly downward, not quite to zero but pretty close. That was "Divorce rates in the general population." Those who didn't use the Bible at all had a divorce rate equal to American society's--no surprise there--but those who used the Bible on a daily basis had a divorce rate that was the same as America's in the good old days around 1900.
Last but not least I have to be happy with my wife because if I wasn't, I'd have some real problems with my father-in-law. You might think, "Come on! You're 55, your father-in-law must be in his 80's at least!" Well, actually, Fred was fairly feeble when I first met him and he died of Parkinson's 15, 20 years ago.
The "father-in-law" that I have to worry about offending is God. (But at least I've got no mother-in-law!) My wife is His daughter. And that's the way I should treat her. Like the daughter of a great king.
That's wisdom for today, folks. Wouldn't this article be worth discussing around the dinner table some evening? And incidentally that's the way the Ukrainian Bible which I'm helping to translate will render this proverb. I sure hope it catches on!
I'd encourage you to recommend this website to anyone you think might be interested in my work. I'm helping give a modern translation of the Bible to a country that's bigger than France or Germany, and has more people than our West Coast states.
