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A central tenet of creation order thinking is that right living requires that we align our lives to the God-given structure of existence. This conception of life as a going with, rather than a going against, what some have called "the grain of the cosmos' is widely believed to be grounded in, and supported by, the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, especially the book of Proverbs. Building on the work of Roland Murphy and others, however, this essay argues that what Scripture means by the life-giving way of wisdom is not best interpreted as conformity to a normative order. My central claim that turning to order to find orientation constitutes an imposition on the biblical writings of a hermeneutic that is indebted to the wisdom tradition we know as Western philosophy, is explored by means of an intratextual and intertextual study of the male-female relationship in Proverbs 30:18–20, as read within Proverbs 30:10–33 and the book as a whole. By paying special attention to facets of meaning and experience that a creation order reading tends to obscure, a wisdom that would celebrate the enigmatic ways of existence and a wisdom that would uncover a hidden order are distinguished, thereby allowing a fresh approach to creational revelation to take shape. In its attunement to the original blessing with which the biblical narrative begins, such a mystery-affirming appreciation of creation does not lead to an anti-nomian eradication of order but to what we might call its ante-nomian relativisation.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70881-2_12

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