Learn to read the Bible's hardest books on their own terms

If you have picked up Job or Ecclesiastes and felt, somewhere beneath the familiar phrases, that you were standing at the edge of something genuinely difficult — something that resists resolution and asks more of you than you expected — then you already understand why this school exists.

Most of us were not taught to read these books well. We were given the consoling summary: Job was patient, God restored him; Ecclesiastes is a little pessimistic but ends on a good note; Proverbs will help you make better decisions. And there is truth in each of those summaries. But the texts themselves are doing something far richer, far stranger, and far more demanding than any of those summaries suggest. They are grappling — with full literary sophistication and deep theological seriousness — with the questions that have always been hardest to answer: Why do the righteous suffer? Is there meaning in a life shadowed by death? What does it mean to live wisely when wisdom has its limits?

What I want to give you in this school is the ability to read these texts the way they were meant to be read. That means slowing down enough to understand their literary forms — how a proverb works and what it is actually claiming, why Job is structured as it is, what the repeated word hebel is actually doing in Ecclesiastes. It means locating them in their ancient Near Eastern world — knowing what Egyptian and Mesopotamian wisdom looked like, so that what Israel's tradition does differently becomes visible and significant. And it means following the theological argument of each book to its actual conclusion, rather than the conclusion we wish it reached.

I also want to take you beyond the three books themselves — through the wisdom Psalms, through the lament tradition, through Psalm 73 (one of the most honest prayers in the entire Bible), and into the New Testament's remarkable claim that the Wisdom at the heart of Israel's tradition has become flesh. A canonical reading of wisdom literature is not a detour from the main point; it is how a mature biblical theology is built.

I have spent years in these texts, and I still find them inexhaustible. They have also accompanied me through seasons of genuine uncertainty, loss, and theological struggle — which may be precisely what they are for. The wisdom books do not promise that all your questions will be answered. What they offer is something better: a tradition of honest inquiry, shaped by the fear of the Lord, that has been sustaining people of faith for three millennia.

I would be honored to guide you through them. Come ready to read carefully, think honestly, and pray with more depth than you arrived with.