Moses told Israel that if they kept God's statutes, the nations would look at them and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people (Deuteronomy 4:6). The reputation he promised them was for wisdom, where you might have expected him to say religion.
The nations already had wise men, a great many of them. If we want to understand what God meant to show the world through his people, we have to know what wisdom meant to those neighbours, and where Israel's wisdom parted from theirs.
Wisdom is skill
The Hebrew word is chokmah, and the first people the Bible says God filled with it are craftsmen. God filled Bezaleel with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship to build the tabernacle (Exodus 31:3). All the women that were wise hearted did spin with their hands (Exodus 35:25). Wisdom, in the Bible's own language, is knowing how a thing is made well enough to build it.
The wisdom books apply that skill to the biggest things anyone builds. Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding it is established (Proverbs 24:3). And God used it first: The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth (Proverbs 3:19). This is why the arrangement of God's household is a wisdom question, and a builder doesn't settle questions like that by taste.
The neighbours were wise, and the Bible says so
The Bible praises Solomon by comparing him to the competition. Solomon's wisdom excelled the wisdom of all the children of the east country, and all the wisdom of Egypt (1 Kings 4:30). Jeremiah asks of Edom, Is wisdom no more in Teman? (Jeremiah 49:7). Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22). Daniel was trained in the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans (Daniel 1:4).
A lot of that wisdom survives. Egypt wrote instructions, a father teaching his son how to succeed at court, all resting on the idea of ma'at, the right order of the world kept by the gods and Pharaoh. Babylon told of seven sages sent by a god to teach the first kings, and its wise men read omens in the livers of sheep. Its best-known wisdom poem has a suffering man ask, Who knows the will of the gods in heaven? Nobody does.
And Israel borrowed. In 1923 an Egyptian book called the Instruction of Amenemope was published, and scholars soon saw that Proverbs 22:17 to 23:11 runs closely alongside it. Remove not the ancient landmark (Proverbs 22:28) matches Amenemope's Do not move the markers on the borders of fields. Riches that make themselves wings; they fly away as an eagle toward heaven (23:5) match riches that made themselves wings like geese. The evidence that the two are connected is strong. Which way the borrowing ran is disputed. Most scholars think Proverbs borrowed from Amenemope, rather than the other way round.
Israel's first lesson in sharing leadership came from a foreigner, too. It was Jethro, a priest of Midian, who told Moses, The thing that thou doest is not good (Exodus 18:17), and Moses hearkened to the voice of his father in law (18:24).
None of this needs to trouble us. Proverbs shows how it handled what it took in. Right before the borrowed sayings it adds a line Amenemope doesn't have: That thy trust may be in the LORD, I have made known to thee this day, even to thee (Proverbs 22:19). Israel kept the good sayings and put them under the fear of the LORD. Grace perfects nature without destroying it.
Where the two wisdoms part
The difference lay deeper than the sayings, since many of them were good enough to borrow. It shows up in four places.
The first is where wisdom comes from. Babylon's gods were hidden and had to be guessed at. Israel's God speaks: the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart (Deuteronomy 30:14). More than once the Bible shows an empire's trained wise men failing, and a Hebrew servant saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace (Genesis 41:16; compare Daniel 2:27-28 and 5:8).
The second is who holds it. In Egypt, wisdom belonged to the scribe. An old Egyptian text has a father tell his son to become a scribe so he won't end up like the smith with fingers like the claws of a crocodile. Israel put wisdom in the street: Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets (Proverbs 1:20). It was taught at home (Deuteronomy 6:7), and it made wise the simple (Psalm 19:7). And the people chose their own wise men for office: Take you wise men, and understanding, and known among your tribes (Deuteronomy 1:13).
Third, there's what wisdom is for. Egypt's instructions mostly aim at success. Ezekiel shows where that ends, in the king of Tyre: thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness (Ezekiel 28:17). Israel's wisdom aims at righteousness and the weak: plead the cause of the poor and needy (Proverbs 31:9).
Last comes where it's seen. You went to the palace to meet Egypt's wise men. Israel's wisdom would be seen in a whole people's life. Even the queen of Sheba, who came to test Solomon with hard questions, was undone by the meat of his table, and the sitting of his servants (1 Kings 10:5). She judged his wisdom by his household.
The honour of kings
It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter (Proverbs 25:2).
A God who wanted to stay unknown wouldn't hide things the way treasure is hidden, to be found. If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the LORD (Proverbs 2:4-5).
And the search is a king's honour. In Babylon, the king and his diviners searched and everyone else waited. In Christ, the whole people are kings: And hath made us kings and priests unto God (Revelation 1:6). The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever (Deuteronomy 29:29). The revealed things belong to us and our children, and to no class of experts.
The same chapter carries a warning: for men to search their own glory is not glory (Proverbs 25:27). There are two kinds of searching. One digs for what God hid. The other digs for a bigger name. A church that confuses them ends up with an honour economy instead of a household.
Searching like this is the method of intra-ecclesial apologetics. God hid the design of his church in two places. One is his word, where it lies scattered through letters and stories about who met where and who ate with whom. The other is his work, the human creature, in what people need and how they learn and heal. Searching out both is the honour of every believer.
Christ, the wisdom of God
The New Testament puts a face on all of this. Jesus increased in wisdom and stature (Luke 2:52). He taught in parables to utter things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world (Matthew 13:35), and he thanked God for hiding these things from the wise and prudent and revealing them unto babes (Matthew 11:25). He said a greater than Solomon is here, and that a foreign queen who travelled to hear Solomon would condemn the generation that ignored him (Matthew 12:42).
Paul calls him Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God, who of God is made unto us wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:24, 30), the one in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3). Christians have long argued about how far to connect him with the figure of Wisdom in Proverbs 8. Nothing here depends on settling that. What Paul says plainly is enough.
And it's wisdom that looks like foolishness. The Greeks seek after wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:22), and God answered them with a crucified man and a church of nobodies: not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called (1:26). The princes of this world, with all their scribes and schools, missed it entirely (2:8).
The church shows it
Paul then says what the hidden wisdom is for: To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10). The church itself shows it, a household of former enemies at one table, with no lecture needed. That's Deuteronomy 4:6 on a larger stage.
James gives the test for telling God's wisdom from the other kind. Earthly wisdom is bitter envying and strife. The wisdom from above is easy to be intreated... without partiality (James 3:14-17), which means it can be corrected and has no favourites. It costs nothing, either: If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not (James 1:5).
The wisdom of the nations never went away. Almost every institution around us still handles wisdom the Egyptian way, as something you get from a school, certified, owned by a profession, and paid for. A congregation can slide into that without anybody deciding to. It only has to do what every other institution in town does. The class system was never safe to borrow, though the sayings always were.
So search, because the honour of kings belongs to you. Take one thing your church does without thinking, and look for it in the New Testament yourself, with other believers, before you open a commentary.