ABSTRACT
A casual reader asked to describe Proverbs 1-9 might reply that it was the words of a father talking to his son, mostly about women. While that might be a naive reading, its very naivete brings into focus some of the features of Proverbs 1-9 that have not always been sufficiently attended to in scholarly discussions. First, these chapters are virtually all talk. They are, to use a currently fashionable word, discourse. But even more importantly, discourse, the dialogic, social dimension of language, becomes a central topic of these chapters. Second, the cast of characters is severely limited, and the privileged axis of communication is that from father to son. The reader’s locus of selfidentification, that is, the subject position established by the reader, is that of the son, the character who never speaks. Third, discourse embodies and generates a symbolic world. Consequently, it is significant that although woman is not the sole topic of the chapters, talk about women and women’s speech occupies an astonishing amount of the text: men, preoccupied with speech, talking out women and women’s speech. What role, then, does sexual difference play in this symbolic world both in making men’s speech possible but at the same time rendering it problematic?
