Lady Folly and the Trouble with Wisdom: Reframing Proverbs 1–9

Abstract

Scholarship has often overlooked Lady Folly’s importance to the message of Prov 1–9 due to the tendency to conflate her with “Outsider Woman” (אשה זרה/נכריה) and to read Proverbs as operating within a strict binary worldview. In this article, I reexamine Lady Folly’s banquet scene (Prov 9:13–18), focusing on the interplay between the characters Lady Folly, Lady Wisdom, and Outsider Woman. I argue that Prov 9 portrays Lady Folly as a popular authority figure within an imagined city in which Lady Wisdom occupies the position of outsider. Rather than functioning as either Outsider Woman by another name or Lady Wisdom’s pure antithesis, Lady Folly epitomizes the hermeneutical struggle at the heart of Proverbs: the pursuit of wisdom is a quest riddled with confusion, ambiguity, and contradiction.