Summary: Bible - Book of Proverbs

The GIST

Proverbs, a book of the Bible, is the great handbook of wisdom in the Hebrew scriptures: thirty-one chapters of poems, warnings and short, sharp sayings about how to live well. It sits in the third section of the Hebrew Bible and in the Christian Old Testament, and tradition ascribes it to King Solomon and his students. Its own headings tell a more layered story, naming Solomon three times but also "the wise", the scribes of King Hezekiah, a man called Agur and a king called Lemuel. Scholars describe it as a collection of collections, gathered from a way of life that lasted more than a thousand years, and say no precise dates can be given for its sayings.

What holds it together is one conviction, stated near the start: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction." From there the book ranges over money, work, speech, anger, friendship, marriage, drink, justice and the raising of children. It appeals less to miracle and revelation than to what a watchful person can see for themselves, and that is why it still reads so freshly.

What It Says

The invitation (chapters 1 to 9). The first nine chapters are not a list of sayings at all. They are a series of speeches from a parent or teacher to a young man, each opening with "My son", mixed with poems in which Wisdom herself speaks as a woman. The opening verses state the purpose: to give "to the young man knowledge and discretion". The first warning is against the gang that says "let us all have one purse" and goes out to rob; such men, the teacher says, "lay wait for their own blood". Then Wisdom appears in the street, crying at the city gates and asking the simple how long they mean to stay simple. Those who ignore her will call when disaster arrives and find she does not answer.

The teacher's promises are generous. Search for wisdom "as for hid treasures" and you will find the knowledge of God. Chapter 3 holds some of the best-known lines in the book: "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding." Wisdom is worth more than silver, gold or rubies: "She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her". The same chapter ties wisdom to the making of the world: "The LORD by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens." Chapter 4 passes the lesson down a family line, a father repeating what his own father taught him: "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom". It adds the counsel on which the rest depends: "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."

Much of this section warns against the strange woman, the adulteress whose lips "drop as an honeycomb" but whose end is "bitter as wormwood". Chapter 5 urges faithfulness instead: "rejoice with the wife of thy youth". Chapter 6 turns to money and laziness, warning against standing surety for another's debt and sending the idler to an unlikely teacher: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise". It lists seven things God hates, among them "A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood". Chapter 7 is a small drama. Watching from his window at twilight, the teacher sees a young man "void of understanding" met by a woman dressed as a harlot, who tells him her husband is away on a long journey. He follows her "as an ox goeth to the slaughter".

Against her stands Wisdom. In chapter 8 she calls from the high places and the gates, claims that "By me kings reign, and princes decree justice", and then makes her most startling claim, that she was there before the world: "The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old." She was present when the heavens were prepared and the sea given its limit, "rejoicing always before him". Chapter 9 sets two houses side by side. Wisdom has built hers, with seven pillars, laid her table and sent out her maidens to invite the simple to eat. The foolish woman sits at her own door calling the same passers-by with a different offer: "Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant." Her guests do not know that the dead are there. Between the two invitations stands the motto again: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom".

The proverbs of Solomon (10:1 to 22:16). A new heading, "The proverbs of Solomon", opens the heart of the book: 375 sayings, by the scholars' count, most of them a single verse in two balanced halves. The first is typical: "A wise son maketh a glad father: but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother." The earlier chapters mostly contrast two kinds of people, the wise and the fool, the righteous and the wicked, the diligent and the lazy. The later ones turn more often to speech.

A few threads run right through. On work: "He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich." On honesty in trade: "A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is his delight." On pride: "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." On the tongue: "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger", and, more starkly, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue". On self-command: "He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city."

The sayings are shrewd about money without worshipping it. "Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith." The poor are God's concern: "He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD", and whoever oppresses them "reproacheth his Maker". There is tenderness about the inner life too: "Hope deferred maketh the heart sick", and "The heart knoweth his own bitterness". And there is a steady reminder that human plans are not the last word: "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps." The collection closes in on its end with lines about family and reputation that are still quoted: "A GOOD name is rather to be chosen than great riches", and "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it."

The words of the wise (22:17 to 24:34). The voice changes with a fresh call: "Bow down thine ear, and hear the words of the wise". What follows are short moral discourses rather than one-line sayings. They forbid moving a neighbour's boundary: "Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set." They paint the drinker with his wounds and red eyes and warn that wine "At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder." A second short group, headed "These things also belong to the wise", ends with a walk past the field of the slothful, overgrown and its wall broken down, from which the speaker draws his lesson.

The Hezekiah collection (chapters 25 to 29). The heading here is the most revealing in the book: "These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out." The sayings are rich in comparisons: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." They ask for kindness to an enemy: "If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat; and if he be thirsty, give him water to drink". They prize honest friendship: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful", and "Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend." And they speak to rulers and the conscience alike: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion."

Here too sits the book's famous contradiction, two verses side by side. "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also be like unto him." Then: "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit."

The words of Agur (chapter 30). Agur the son of Jakeh begins with a confession that he has not learned wisdom, and asks who has gone up to heaven or "gathered the wind in his fists". His prayer is modest: "give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me". The rest is a string of number riddles: four things never satisfied, four things too wonderful to understand, four small creatures that are "exceeding wise", among them the ants, the conies, the locusts and the spider.

King Lemuel and the virtuous woman (chapter 31). The last chapter gives the teaching a king received from his mother. Kings are to leave wine alone, lest they forget the law, and to speak for those with no voice: "Open thy mouth, judge righteously, and plead the cause of the poor and needy." Then comes the closing portrait: "Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies." She rises before dawn, buys a field and plants a vineyard, spins, trades with merchants, clothes her household and gives to the poor. "She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness." The book that began with a father's voice ends with a mother's, and with a woman whose own works "praise her in the gates".

Why It Matters

Proverbs stands with Job and Ecclesiastes as the Bible's wisdom literature, and scholars set the three in a wider world. Wisdom writing was common across the ancient Near East, and one part of the book, the words of the wise that begin at 22:17, is described as largely a recasting of a far older Egyptian work, the Instruction of Amenemope. Unlike most of the Hebrew Bible, these books hardly mention the Exodus, Sinai or the covenant. They argue from reason and observation. Scholars also note that Proverbs mostly presents a tidy world where keeping the rules brings reward, a confidence that Job and Ecclesiastes each challenge in their own way.

On its making, scholars differ in approach. Some assign the sections to different periods, with chapters 1 to 9 and the closing chapters composed last, in the Persian or Hellenistic age; others study the book in its finished form. The Hezekiah heading, taken at face value, points to collecting in the late eighth century BCE. The book's seams caused trouble early: according to the account given, the rabbis of the late first century nearly left Proverbs out of the Bible because of contradictions such as the pair of verses on answering a fool.

The figure of Wisdom at creation had a long afterlife. Later wisdom writers developed the idea that Wisdom existed before the world and that God made the universe through her. Christianity took up that thinking and applied it to Jesus. In the fourth century the verse about the LORD possessing Wisdom "in the beginning of his way" was used on both sides of the dispute with the Arians, who argued that the Son, like Wisdom, was created; their opponents prevailed, and the Nicene Creed called the Son begotten, not made.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who wants practical counsel that has been tested for a very long time. It suits parents and young adults, people who lead and people who work for them, and readers of any faith or none who enjoy a hard truth packed into a single line.