1The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel.
2To know wisdom and reproof,
to understand discerning maxims.
3To accept the reproof of insight,
righteousness, justice, and uprightness.
4To give shrewdness to the simple,
to a lad, knowledge and cunning.
5Let the wise man hear and gain learning,
and the discerning acquire designs.
6To understand proverbs and adages,
the words of the wise and their riddles.
7The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.
Wisdom and reproof dolts despise.
8Hear, my son, your father’s reproof,
and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.
9For they are a garland of grace on your head
and a necklace round your throat.
10My son, should offenders seduce you,
11Should they say,
“Go with us, let us lie in wait for blood,
stalk the innocent for no reason.
12Let us swallow them live like Sheol,
and the blameless like those gone down to the Pit.
13All precious treasure we shall find,
we shall fill our houses with loot.
14Your lot you should throw in with us,
15My son, do not go on a road with them,
hold back your foot from their path.
16For their feet run to evil,
and they hurry to shed blood.
17For the net is spread out for no reason
in the eyes of each wingèd thing.
18Yet they lie in wait for their own blood,
they lurk for their own lives.
19Thus are the ways of all who chase gain,
its possessor’s life it will take.
20Wisdom cries out in the streets,
in the squares she lifts her voice.
21At the bustling crossroads she calls,
at the entrance to the town’s gate says her sayings:
22How long, dupes, will you love being duped,
and scoffers lust scoffing,
and fools hate knowledge?
23Turn back to my rebuke.
Look, I would pour out my spirit to you,
I would make my words known with you.
24Because I called and you resisted,
I reached out my hand and none paid heed,
25and you flung aside all my counsel,
and you did not want my rebuke.
26I, too, shall laugh at your ruin,
I shall mock when what you feared comes,
27when what you feared comes like disaster,
and your ruin like a whirlwind descends,
when straits and distress come upon you.
28Then they will call me and I shall not answer,
they will seek me and they will not find me.
29Because they have hated knowledge,
and the LORD’s fear they did not choose.
30They did not want my counsel,
they spurned all my rebuke.
31And they ate from the fruit of their way,
and from their own counsels they were sated.
32For the waywardness of dupes will kill them
and the smugness of fools will destroy them.
33But who heeds me will dwell secure,
and tranquil from the fear of harm.
CHAPTER 1 NOTES
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1. The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel. This editorial headnote for the book follows the Late Biblical practice of ascribing texts to famous figures from the national past. In this case, the ascription was obviously encouraged by the legendary wisdom reported of Solomon in 1 Kings, including his having composed many proverbs. In fact, the collections of sayings and longer poems assembled in the book were written in all probability centuries after Solomon, with the earliest stratum going back, perhaps, to the eighth century B.C.E., although some individual proverbs may well have been older.
proverbs. The Hebrew mishley—which actually means “proverbs of “—became the prevalent title for the book in Jewish tradition. The term, which suggests some sort of artful expression, usually poetic, has no entirely satisfactory English equivalent because it variously means “proverb,” “parable,” “poetic theme,” “rhapsodic utterance.”
2. To know wisdom and reproof. The series of infinitive phrases, which runs from here to the end of verse 4 and is picked up again in verse 6, is quite untypical of literary syntax in the Bible. It is presumably used because it lays out an agenda for the book, with everything from the beginning through verse 9 constituting a formal prelude to the book proper. “Reproof,” musar, and the matching term “rebuke,” tokheḥah (verses 23,25, and 30), are prominently featured because the pedagogical assumption of the book is that the unsuspecting young need to be warned of life’s dangers and scolded for their susceptibility to temptation—a process that will be repeatedly evident, beginning here in verses 10–19.
4. shrewdness . . . / cunning. This book uses in a positive sense a cluster of terms—“designs” in the next verse belongs to the cluster—that in other contexts have a connotation of deviousness and scheming. (“Shrewdness,” ʿormah, for example, is the word used for the primeval serpent in Genesis 3:1.) Such usage fits in with the pragmatic curriculum of Proverbs. Intelligence of the most practical sort, involving an alertness to potential deceptions and seductions, is seen as an indispensable tool for the safe, satisfying, and ethical life, and a fool is repeatedly thought of as a dupe.
6. riddles. This is the same term, ḥidah, that is used in the Samson story. Some of the one-line proverbs, as we shall see, are actually cast as riddles, with the first verset posing the riddle and the second verset the solution. The burden of the entire line is that fine attentiveness is required to take in fully the words of the wise, and that idea is borne out by the compressed wit exhibited in many of the proverbs.
7. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. This summarizing statement reflects a distinctive Israelite emphasis not evident in analogous Wisdom texts in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
8. Hear, my son. The persona of the Mentor now emerges, addressing his inexperienced disciple—as he will repeatedly do later—as “son,” in keeping with the precedent of Egyptian Wisdom writings.
10. offenders. One immediately sees why the traditional rendering of ḥataʾim as “sinners,” perpetuated in many modern translations, is not quite right. These are offenders in the strict criminal sense, a gang of violent thugs. This monitory poem runs to the end of verse 19, followed by Wisdom’s first speech, which takes up fourteen verses until the end of the chapter. Continuous poems of roughly this length constitute the first nine-chapter unit of the book. Then there is a shift to one-line proverbs.
do not be willing. The two-word Hebrew verset looks textually suspect, reflecting a rhythmic imbalance with the first verset.
11. Should they say. This formula for introducing speech, as elsewhere in biblical poetry, seems to be extrametrical.
blood, / innocent. These two terms, distributed between the two versets, are, as Michael V. Fox neatly observes, a breakup of a bound collocation, “blood of the innocent,” dam naqi.
12. swallow them live like Sheol. The implication of “blood” in the previous line is spelled out: the thugs’ plan is to murder their victims and then seize their wealth.
14. one purse we all shall have. The thugs appeal to the young man not only on the basis of profit (“precious treasure”) to be had but also for the camaraderie in crime that they offer.
15. road / path. Though these terms and related synonyms are a figure for a way of behavior, they are also literal here: the bandits want to draw the young man with them on a road where they will lie in wait for victims.
17. For the net is spread out for no reason. The unwitting birds do not imagine that the fowlers’ net spread below them is meant to entrap them.
18. Yet they lie in wait for their own blood. Most interpreters, seeing an implied analogy between the unwitting birds and the naïve young drawn into crime, understand this to mean that the criminals do not imagine that they will be caught by the dire consequences of their own crime, do not realize that they are their own ambushers. This would be in keeping with an idea stressed in Proverbs—and vehemently rejected in Job—that there is a built-in moral mechanism that leads from crime to disaster for its perpetrators. Similarly in the next verse, ill-gotten gain is said to take “its possessor’s life.”
20. Wisdom cries out in the streets. Lady Wisdom, an important personage in the first large unit of Proverbs, is as close to an allegorical figure as the Hebrew Bible comes. Attempts to derive her from the Greek Sophia are questionable, and it is by no means clear that any of this book was written as late as the Hellenistic period. Female figures as symbols of nations—most notably, Zion—are common in biblical literature, but not as embodiments of abstractions. Perhaps the centrality of the quality of wisdom in this poetic book led to a feminine personification. The Hebrew ḥokhmah is a feminine noun, but here it appears in a plural form, ḥokhmot, construed grammatically as a singular (like Behemoth in Job). This could be a plural of intensification or an archaic form.
21. bustling crossroads. This translation follows a proposal by Fox. The literal sense is “chief [or head] of the bustlings,” which he plausibly construes as an ellipsis.
25. flung aside. The verb is elsewhere used for unbinding the hair, so it literally means something like to put in disarray.
27. straits and distress. The Hebrew similarly features alliteration, tsarah umetsukah.
31. ate from the fruit of their way. As in verses 18 and 19, the idea is that they had to taste the bitter consequences of their own evil acts.
from their own counsels they were sated. This verset extends the idea of eating the dire consequences of crime. “Counsels,” moʿetsot, antithetically picks up the “counsel” of Wisdom (verse 30) that was spurned, the two words here being different noun formations from the same root.
33. who heeds me will dwell secure. Again and again, Proverbs pushes the notion that there is a pragmatic payoff for following the precepts of wisdom: those who do so will enjoy untroubled lives, secure from harm.