Educational Collapse

He will die for lack of instruction, and in the greatness of his foolishness he will go astray.  Proverbs 5:23  NASB

Greatness of his foolishness – It is the common assumption of the West that education is the accumulation and manipulation of data.  “The facts, ma’am” sets the tone.   We believe that armed with the facts we can overcome objections, manage life, and embrace the truth.  This approach to cognitive investigation has its roots in Greek thinking, especially in the development of rationality as the touchstone of verifiability.  At one point in the history of Western philosophy, intellectuals proclaimed that an assertion without sensory, factual verification was verbal nonsense.  If you couldn’t see it, feel it, smell it, taste it, or hear it (in some way of another), then it wasn’t real.  That development played havoc with a great deal of human interaction and was in need of correction, but the underlying idea remains.  Miracles can’t happen because they aren’t rational.  The rational is real.  Anything else is fiction no matter how strongly it is maintained.

This Western idea, germinating for two thousand years, stands in opposition to ancient Semitic epistemology.  We have to remember that when we read a statement like this one in Proverbs.  Instruction and education are quite different in the ancient world.  At least different in the objective.  It is not the accumulation of facts that matters.  An educated man is not a walking encyclopedia.  What matters is harmony with the world, and the world is everything there is, including the unseen spiritual realm.  Folly is believing that what my senses tell me is the whole picture.  In the ancient world, there are many other factors at play that lay outside the scope of human sensory apprehension.  Men disregard these at their peril.

What is “greatness of foolishness”?  It isn’t being mistaken.  It’s being corrupt.

“The Hebrew words rendered fool in Proverbs, and often elsewhere in the ot denote one who is morally deficient.” Such a person is lacking in sense and is generally corrupt. If one can posit a gradation in the words for fool, ʾĕwîl would be one step below kĕsîl and only one step above nābāl (q.v.). An even stronger word in Prov is lēṣ, often translated “scoffer.” The ʾĕwîl is not only a kĕsîl because of his choices, but he is also insolent. . . ʾĕwîl primarily refers to moral perversion or insolence, to what is sinful rather than to mental stupidity. This kind of a fool despises wisdom and is impatient with discipline.^[1]

 Consider the enormous difference between someone who is stupid and someone who is sinful.  Oh, before you can even think about that difference, you must first realize that sin is an essential and critical element in the ancient world, and sin only exists as a contrast to holiness, presupposing the divine.  So, if you strip your world of divinity (exile the God of creation), then you won’t have a concept of sin and a fool will become someone in need of proper education, not repentance.  That shift is the greatness of foolishness.  It results in death.

Topical Index: foolishness, ʾĕwîl ,ʾiwwelet, education, stupid, corrupt, Proverbs 5:23

^[1] Goldberg, L. (1999). 44 אול. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 19). Moody Press.