A Study of Proverbs by Chad Sychtysz

Twenty study sections through all thirty-one chapters — the book everybody quotes and almost nobody teaches straight through.

Proverbs is one of the hardest books in the Bible to teach, and the reason has nothing to do with difficulty. Most of it is plain enough on a first reading. The problem is shape. From chapter 10 onward the book is a collection rather than an argument — hundreds of two-line sayings set down one after another with no thread running between them. A class that reads straight through covers a great deal of ground and remembers almost none of it.

Chad Sychtysz handles this by teaching the book the way it is actually built. The opening nine chapters are a father's sustained counsel to his son, so they are studied in sequence, passage by passage, as the connected argument they are. The great middle collection is gathered instead by subject — what Solomon says about family, about work and laziness, about honesty, about fools, about how we treat other people, about the tongue, about pride. The four shorter collections that close the book each get their own treatment.

Running underneath is the book's own claim: the fear of the Lord is where knowledge starts. Wisdom here is not cleverness and not information. She is personified as a woman shouting in the street to anyone who will listen — publicly, indiscriminately, with nothing to hide — set against the adulteress who works by seduction and stealth. The whole book turns on which of those two voices a man follows.

What's Inside

Introduction to the Book of Proverbs — what a proverb is and how Hebrew parallelism works, where Proverbs sits in the canon and in wisdom literature, the mind-heart-mouth pattern the book keeps returning to, how the literary form shifts from section to section, and the personification of Wisdom against the "strange woman"

Section I — A Father's Counsel to His Son (1:1–9:18), studied in sequence

1. Prologue (1:1–7)
2. Choosing between Thieves and Wisdom (1:8–33)
3. The Value of Pursuing Wisdom (2:1–22)
4. Wisdom and Her Rewards (3:1–35)
5. A Father's Instruction to His Son (4:1–27)
6. The Adulteress's Seduction (5:1–23)
7. Things to Pursue or Avoid (6:1–19)
8. More Things to Pursue or Avoid (6:20–7:27)
9. Contrasts between "Wisdom" and the "Adulteress" (8:1–9:18)

Section II — Contrast of the Wise and Fools (10:1–22:16), gathered by topic

10. Proverbs about Family (Spouses, Parents, and "Sons")
11. Proverbs about Industriousness and Laziness
12. Proverbs about Honesty and Dishonesty
13. Proverbs about Wise Men and Fools
14. Proverbs about the Treatment of or Regard for Human Beings
15. Proverbs about Words and Speech
16. Proverbs about Pride and Humility

17. Section III — Words of a Teacher to His Pupil (22:17–24:34)
18. Section IV — Uncategorized Instructions and Similitudes (25:1–29:27)
19. Section V — The Proverbs of Agur (30:1–33)
20. Section VI — The Proverbs of King Lemuel (31:1–31), including the excellent wife

Format & Features

Every one of the twenty sections closes with discussion questions, and they are written to be argued about rather than merely answered — what passes for wisdom today and why it sells so well while God's word sits unread; whether Christians lean too hard on the rewards of obedience or the consequences of disobedience, and whether both are needed. The questions are spaced for writing, so the book works on a Wednesday night, in a Sunday adult class, or at the kitchen table.

The introduction runs eleven pages before the first study section and does real work: it explains why the literary form keeps changing on you, which is exactly the thing that derails most classes partway through. Sychtysz also recommends reading Proverbs straight through once before starting, so the class arrives with the whole shape in mind.

Endnotes carry the supporting detail without slowing the sections down, and a full source list closes the book — Barnes, Coffman, Delitzsch, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, the Pulpit Commentary, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, the Holman Bible Dictionary, and the Teacher's Bible Commentary among them.

Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible.

Product Details

Who It's For

Adult Bible class teachers who want a full quarter of practical Old Testament material and a way through the middle of Proverbs that a class can actually follow. Preachers mining the book for series material on speech, work, money, or family. Parents who keep telling their kids to read a chapter a day and have never worked through it themselves.

About the Author

Chad Sychtysz has been a minister of the gospel since 1994, serving churches in Alaska and Washington state. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and has written numerous books and workbooks on the Bible, including studies of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon. He lives in Billings, Montana.