Proverbs

Author: Solomon and others

Proverbs is instruction for living skillfully, mostly in short sayings gathered under Solomon’s name.

Outline

  1. The invitation of wisdom (1–9)

    A father warns his son, and wisdom calls in the street as a woman the fool refuses.

  2. The proverbs of Solomon (10–22)

    Hundreds of short contrasts set the wise and the foolish, the righteous and the wicked, side by side.

  3. Words of the wise (22–24)

    Longer sayings, including a set copied by Hezekiah’s men, apply the same instruction to court and work.

  4. Agur, Lemuel, and the capable woman (30–31)

    Two further voices close the book, and the last poem praises a woman who fears the Lord.

Key verses

  • Proverbs 1:7

    The fear of the Lord is called the beginning of knowledge.

  • Proverbs 3:5–6

    The son is told to trust the Lord and not to lean on his own understanding.

  • Proverbs 31:30

    Charm and beauty are said to be passing, and a woman who fears the Lord is praised.

Proverbs presents itself as Solomon’s wisdom, taught so that the simple may become prudent and the young man may know discretion. The opening verse also says these sayings are for understanding a proverb and a riddle, which is a warning not to treat every line as a law that fires the same way in every case. The book is instruction in a craft. The craft is living in the world the Lord made, with speech, work, money, sex, and power all in view.

The first nine chapters are not yet the two-line sayings most people quote. They are speeches. A father tells his son to hear, to refuse the gang that wants him to ambush the innocent, and to flee the strange woman whose house goes down to death. Wisdom is personified. She calls at the gates. She was beside the Lord when he marked out the foundations of the earth. Folly is also personified, loud and sitting at her door. The young man is not given a neutral street. Two women are calling. The fear of the Lord is named at the start as the beginning of knowledge, and it is repeated so the cleverness of the later chapters is not detached from worship.

Chapters 10 through 22 are the collection people mean when they say “a proverb”: a line and a counter-line. A soft answer turns away wrath. A slack hand makes poor. The righteous man cares for his beast. Treasures gained by wickedness do not profit. These lines are observations trained by the fear of the Lord, not promises that the wise never suffer. Job sits next to Proverbs in the canon and will not let a reader turn every proverb into a verdict on a neighbor’s sores. Inside Proverbs itself the sayings sometimes balance each other. One line says answer a fool, and another says do not. The wise reader is expected to know which moment he is in.

A smaller collection, “the words of the wise,” gives longer counsels about boundaries, gluttony, and the king’s table. Hezekiah’s men copy more of Solomon’s proverbs, which shows the book growing after Solomon’s lifetime. Agur’s sayings in chapter 30 are weary of human boast and full of numerical lists: things too wonderful, things the earth cannot bear. King Lemuel’s mother warns him against wine and against forgetting the poor. The book then ends with an acrostic portrait of a capable woman. She buys fields, clothes her household, opens her hand to the poor, and is praised in the gates. The poem’s last contrast is not between a busy woman and an idle one only. Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, and a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. The book that began with the fear of the Lord as the start of knowledge ends with that fear as the thing worth praising in a life.

Chapters