Florida senator Marco Rubio is fond of tweeting out Bible verses to his followers. Lately, he’s been quoting the Book of Proverbs. Believe it or not, this is grounds for criticism—and from a Hebrew Bible professor at the Yale Divinity School no less. Prof. Joel Baden writes in Politico that “Proverbs is probably the most Republican book of the entire Bible.”
How so? “Proverbs is notable in that [it] presents a fairly consistent view of the world: The righteous are rewarded, and the wicked are punished,” he explains. “In the understanding of Proverbs, everyone gets what is coming to them; behavior is directly linked to reward or punishment.” There are worse things that could be associated with a party’s worldview.
Proverbs is traditionally attributed to King Solomon—a point Rubio used to poke fun at Baden. Linking to the Politico story, Rubio tweeted, “Proverbs is the Republican part of the bible? I don’t think Solomon had yet joined the GOP when he wrote the first 29 chapters of Proverbs.”
As silly as Baden’s politicization of Proverbs may be, he deserves praise for one passing remark: “The Bible is the foundational text of Western civilization, after all.” Clearly, Baden hadn’t gotten the memo.
Just days before, President Trump’s invocation of Western civilization in his Warsaw speech was savaged by the center-left. Vox called the speech “an alt-right manifesto” and used scare quotes for Western “civilization” and “values.” The Atlantic also scare-quoted “civilization,” insisting that Trump’s version “boils down to ties of ethnicity and blood.”
For the record, The Scrapbook believes in Western civilization (no arch punctuation required). Reassessing tradition is a noble Western enterprise, but equating ancient wisdom with modern politics is foolish. As is written in Proverbs, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” At least that’s the way it’s written in the King James Version, the most Republican translation of the Bible, we’re told.
