Nature and Grace in the Interpretation of Proverbs

A point which has often arrested the attention of interpreters of the Song of the Valiant Woman, which concludes the book of Proverbs, is the relationship of the body of the poem, with its catalogue of the down-to-earth exploits of the lady portrayed, to verse 30b, which describes her as "the woman who fears Yahweh." The poem as a whole describes such mundane and this-worldly activities, and the theme of yir’at YHWH is so emphatically religious, that their juxtaposition within the same tightly-knit poetic structure has often evoked comment in the history of interpretation. The poles of the relationship in question are readily identified, within the tradition of Christian theology, with the themes "nature" “grace." On the one hand we have the "natural" realm, the arena of ordinary and everyday earthly activities and concerns; on the other hand we have the "spiritual" realm, the domain of religion and worship is no secret that the relationship between nature and grace has historically been conceived in fundamentally different ways, and that the differing paradigms for construing that relationship correlate with profoundly divergent Christian attitudes to the perennial questions of Christ and culture, church and world, faith and reason. It is perhaps legitimate to speak in this connection of different Christian worldviews. It will be the purpose of this essay to show how different worldviews, understood in the sense of traditional paradigms relating nature grace, have influenced the history of the interpretation of Proverbs 31:10-31 from patristic times to the present. In this way I propose to illustrate the more general point, too often neglected in biblical studies, that one's basic stance on this fundamental religious issue is of decisive significance in the exegesis and interpretation of the scriptures. On that score there is no essential difference between early patristic and contemporary critical students of the Bible. For present purposes I will distinguish four such worldviews, recog-