The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Not a suggestion, not a starting point for the particularly devout – a structural statement about how reality works. Every generation goes looking for wisdom and looks in mostly the same places: philosophy, science, experience, the opinions of people they admire. Proverbs does not say those things are worthless. It says they are downstream. Today we look at what *yir’at* actually means, what Israel’s wisdom tradition had that no other culture could locate, and why the person who genuinely fears God is harder to deceive than almost anyone else in the room.
Twin Tree Project 