Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

I just finished teaching through the Book of Proverbs in my Wisdom Literature class and thought I’d share this video.  It is exactly what the title of the post says a “commercial for God.”  Basically, these two girls read Proverbs 3:9-10 verbatim.  Just be careful because it might give you a sickening feel in your stomach when you see that God has an 800 number.

I used this video as entry way into discussing the doctrine of retribution and how it is part of Old Testament theology, but was not intended to be taken as a complete picture of how the world works.  So, it can, therefore, be abused.  For instance, I brought texts like Proverbs 30:7-10 into the picture to show that the doctrine of retribution wasn’t even meant to be taken as a complete picture of how the world works within the Book of Proverbs itself.

At any rate, you might find a better video for entering into the doctrine of retribution.  But, this is the one I used:

In my Wisdom Literature class, I’m taking the approach of tradition history.  We are trying to look at this corpus through each stage of development.  We started with textual criticism.

At any rate, I can’t find the exact video I used, but this one will do.  To illustrate the importance of textual criticism, I told them that they did not want to be the preacher preaching on a text that might not have been original to a book.  To help communicate the point, I showed them this video:

It’s a sweet little video isn’t it.  Problem is that it’s based on Proverbs 4:7, which a text that is in the Masoretic text, but not in the Septuagint.

I wasn’t trying to make any points about whether or not the text was original.  I only wanted to realize that in preaching these sorts of things ought to be taken into consideration.  You may not want to focus in a sermon, or theological dialogue, or a song on a text that could be questionable from a text critical perspective.