Honey and Wormwood Taste and the Embodiment of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs

Proverbs conceives of words as food, which a person eats, stores in his stomach, and regurgitates as speech. The sense of taste plays a crucial role in this imaginative process as an evaluator of sweet and bitter, wise and foolish: a well-trained palate rejects folly's bitterness and ingests wisdom's sweetness. In this understanding, acquiring wisdom is as much a bodily process as it is a mental one.