CHAPTER 20

                ¹Wine is a scoffer, strong drink is rowdy,

                    all who dote on them get no wisdom.

                ²A roar like a lion—a king’s terror,

                    who provokes him mortally offends.

                ³It honors a man to sit back from a quarrel,

                    but any dolt will jump right in.

                ⁴After winter the sluggard does not plow,

                    he asks in the harvest and has nothing.

                ⁵Deep waters the counsel in a man’s heart,

                    but a man of discernment draws them up.

                ⁶Many a man is called faithful partner,

                    but who can find a trustworthy person?

                ⁷The righteous man goes about in his innocence.

                    Happy his children after him!

                ⁸A king seated on the throne of judgment

                    sifts out all evil with his eyes.

                ⁹Who can say, “I declare my heart pure.

                    I am clean of my offense”?

                ¹⁰Two different weight-stones, two different measures—

                    the LORD’s loathing are they both.

                ¹¹In his deeds a lad may dissemble

                    though his acts be upright and pure.

                ¹²An ear that hears and an eye that sees,

                    the LORD made them both.

                ¹³Do not love sleep, lest you lose all your worth,

                    keep your eyes open and be sated with bread.

                ¹⁴“Bad, bad,” says the buyer,

                    and he goes away and then preens himself.

                ¹⁵There is gold with abundance of rubies,

                    but lips of knowledge are a precious vessel.

                ¹⁶Take his garment, for he stood bond for another,

                    and for strangers, take his pledge.

                ¹⁷Bread got through fraud may be sweet to a man,

                    but in the end it fills his mouth with gravel.

                ¹⁸Plans set through counsel will be fulfilled,

                    and you should make war through designs.

                ¹⁹Laying bare secrets the gossip goes round;

                    don’t trust yourself to a blabbermouth.

                ²⁰Who reviles his father and his mother,

                    his lamp will gutter in pitch darkness.

                ²¹An estate gained hastily from the start,

                    its end will not be blessed.

                ²²Do not say, “Let me pay back evil.”

                    Hope for the LORD, that He give you victory.

                ²³Two different weight-stones are the LORD’s loathing,

                    and cheating scales are not good.

                ²⁴From the LORD are the steps of a man,

                    and how can a person grasp his own way?

                ²⁵It’s a snare for a man to utter “Sanctified,”

                    and after the vows to reflect.

                ²⁶A wise king sifts out the wicked

                    and turns the wheel over them.

                ²⁷The LORD’s lamp is the life-breath of man,

                    laying bare all the inward chambers.

                ²⁸Let a king keep faithful trust,

                    that he uphold his throne in faithfulness.

                ²⁹The splendor of young men is their strength,

                    and the glory of elders, gray hair.

                ³⁰With fearsome bruises scour away evil,

                    and blows to the belly’s chambers.

CHAPTER 20 NOTES

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1. strong drink. A persuasive argument has been made that the Hebrew sheikhar is a strong drink made from grapes, which is to say, grappa.

3. will jump right in. The general sense of the verb yitgalaʿ is to burst out—here, perhaps, in rage. There is some doubt about its meaning in this context.

6. who can find a trustworthy person. This proverb is one of many that does not offer direct advice but instead registers a cautionary observation about human behavior. The trust in the moral perceptiveness of the king expressed in verse 8 and elsewhere is the antithesis to this realistic skepticism.

9. I declare my heart pure. It is also possible to construe the Hebrew verb here to mean “I have made my heart pure.”

11. In his deeds a lad may dissemble. The proverb is understood in this translation to be a comment on a paradoxical possibility of human behavior: even though a young person’s acts may be perfectly honest, he may nevertheless use them to create a false impression.

14. he goes away and then preens himself. What appears to be involved is a satiric vignette of a particular kind of consumer: he dismisses the merchandise as utterly inferior, whether it is or not, and then goes off empty-handed, congratulating himself on his own acumen. Alternately, one could emend the verb ʾozel, “goes away,” to huzal, “is cheapened,” as Heinrich Graetz proposed in the nineteenth century. This would yield the following miniature narrative: first the prospective buyer denigrates the merchandise; then the price comes down and he buys it, praising himself for his shrewdness.

16. Take his garment. Here the reiterated warning against offering bond for another is cast as an imperative: take his garment or whatever he has put up as security, seeing that he has been foolish enough to expose himself to this sort of risk.

22. “Let me pay back evil.” / Hope for the LORD, that He give you victory. This admonition may recall the story of David and Abigail in 1 Samuel 25. David, enraged when his men are insulted by her husband, Nabal, is on his way to wreak vengeance, but Abigail implores him not to shed blood and have his own hand “rescue” or “give victory” (the same verb as here) but to leave vengeance to the LORD.

25. to utter “Sanctified,” / and after the vows to reflect. Although the general sense of the verse seems to be that one should not really pronounce vows of sacrifices for the Temple, the Hebrew wording and, in particular, the verb represented here as “utter” are obscure.

26. the wheel. The probable reference is to the wheels of a chariot with which a triumphant king would crush the defeated enemy.

27. laying bare. The Hebrew verb ḥofes seems to say “searching out,” which would work for God but not for a lamp, but it should be either read as ḥosef (a simple transposition of consonants) or understood to have the sense of ḥosef, such reversals of consonants with a retention of the meaning being not infrequent in biblical verbal stems.

all the inward chambers. Literally, “all the belly’s chambers.”

28. Let a king keep. The translation assumes a singular, yitsor, for the plural yitsru in the received text. This assumption is encouraged by the Masoretic linking of the verb with a hyphen to melekh, “king,” suggesting that this singular noun is the grammatical subject of the verb.

30. fearsome bruises. The Hebrew joins two synonyms in the construct state (“bruises of wound”), which as elsewhere is an intensifier.

scour away. There is some margin of doubt about the meaning of this term, especially since the consonantal text shows it as a verb, tamriq (which ordinarily does not appear in this particular conjugation), whereas the Masoretic marginal note corrects it to tamruq (“unguent”?). The most likely meaning, if one considers the repeated affirmation of corporal punishment in Proverbs, is that the only appropriate way of dealing with an evil person is to beat the living daylights out of him.

the belly’s chambers. This is the same Hebrew phrase that is used at the end of verse 27.