A scholar is committed to building on knowledge that others have gathered, correcting it, confirming it, enlarging it.

Experience alone opens a door, but intellectual framing and reflection are required if meaning is to be made of the experience.

A whole intellectual intercourse is established: clerks are appointed to maintain it like the ancient guardians of the sacred flame and issue permits to think and speak.

I know everything I know about.

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.

More than anything, studying the Bible with Jews dislodged my parochial thinking about God, and it's had a lasting impact. Over time, I came to appreciate firsthand the richness and depth of that tradition. I also felt some shame for never really being exposed to it before,

The point is that Proverbs 26:4—5 doesn't tell me what to do. It wasn't designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.

Abimelech replied, “I do not know who has done this. You did not tell me, so I have not heard about it until today.”

Then Shechem said to Dinah’s father and brothers, “Grant me this favor, and I will give you whatever you ask.

Then he turned from him toward another and asked about the offer, and those people answered him just as the first ones had answered.

And Solomon answered all her questions; nothing was too difficult for the king to explain.

And when the chariot commanders saw that he was not the king of Israel, they turned back from pursuing him.