CHAPTER 22
1A name is choicer than great wealth—
than silver and gold, good favor.
2The rich and the poor come together,
the LORD is maker of both.
3The shrewd man sees harm and hides,
but dupes pass on and are punished.
4What follows humility is fear of the LORD,
wealth and honor and life.
5Thorns and pitfalls in the way of the crooked,
who guards his life keeps far from them.
6Train up a lad in the way he should go,
when he grows old he will still not swerve from it.
7The rich rules over the poor,
and the borrower is slave to the man who lends.
8Who sows wrongdoing will reap injustice,
and the rod of his wrath will fail.
9The generous one, he shall be blessed,
for he gave of his bread to the wretched.
10Banish the scoffer and strife will depart,
dispute and demeaning will cease.
11Who loves heart’s purity,
speaks graciously—the king is his friend.
12The LORD’s eyes watch over knowledge,
and He confounds the traitor’s words.
13The sluggard said, “A lion’s outside
in the square. I shall be murdered!”
14A deep pit is the mouth of stranger-women.
The cursed of the LORD will fall into it.
15When folly is bound to the heart of a lad,
the rod of rebuke will remove it from him.
16One oppresses the wretched but makes him increase,
one gives to the wealthy but he comes to want.
17Bend your ear and hear the words of the wise,
and set your heart on my knowledge.
18For it is sweet that you keep them in your belly,
that they all be fit on your lips.
19For your trust to be in the LORD,
I have informed you today, even you.
20Have I not written for you thirty things
in good counsel and knowledge?—
21to inform you the utmost true sayings,
to respond to those who send you.
22Do not rob the wretched, for wretched is he,
and do not crush the poor in the gate.
23For the LORD will argue their case,
and deprive those who deprived them of life.
24Consort not with an irascible man,
and do not join a hotheaded person,
25lest you learn his ways
and take on a snare for your life.
26Do not be of those who give their hand in pledge,
who back up extortionate loans.
27If you have nothing with which to pay,
why should your bedding be taken from under you?
28Do not shift the age-old boundary stone
that your forefathers set up.
29Have you seen a man who is quick at his task?
Before kings he shall stand.
He shall not stand before the lowly.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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2. come together. More literally, “meet.” Although exegetical energy has been lavished on the question of what it means for the rich and the poor to come together, the obvious sense, dictated by the second clause of this line, is that whatever social and economic differences separate the rich and the poor, in the end they are both God’s creatures and equal before Him.
3. pass on and are punished. Evidently, the unreflective dupe passes on in the direction of harm, or moves right through it, not realizing the damage it is inflicting on him. “Punished” in this context suggests something like “come to grief.”
6. in the way he should go. While the literal sense is “according to his way,” there is no reason to swerve from the formulation of the King James Version, which catches the intended meaning and has become proverbial.
8. the rod of his wrath will fail. The assumption is that the wrongdoer is hurtfully aggressive toward others (“rod,” shevet, is the same instrument wielded instructionally against sons, though in that case it is a “rod of reproof “). In the end, when he gets his comeuppance, his power to harm others will fail.
9. The generous one. Literally, “good of eye.”
11. speaks graciously. The literal sense of the Hebrew, which has no verb, is “graciousness of his lips.”
13. I shall be murdered. The inappropriate verb (instead of “eaten up” or “killed”) is probably deliberate. The lazy man, giving free rein to his fantasy in order to find excuses for not leaving his house, imagines that the lion prowling the streets will viciously “murder” him, as though it were a malicious assassin.
14. A deep pit is the mouth of stranger-women. As elsewhere, the stranger-woman is somebody else’s (seductive) wife. Her mouth is a dangerous pit because she uses it to speak the sweet talk of seduction (for a vivid example, see chapter 7). It is also prelude and analogue to the lower “pit” in which she seeks to draw the gullible young man.
15. When folly is bound to the heart of a lad. In the rather brutal pedagogy of Proverbs, if your child shows foolish inclinations, you need to beat them out of him.
16. One oppresses . . . / one gives. This is another proverb that is not a didactic maxim but rather an observation about the sometimes paradoxical nature of human reality: in some cases, a person may seek to take advantage of a poor man and yet the poor man thrives; in some cases, a person may give to someone who already has plenty and somehow the rich man ends up in want.
17. Bend your ear and hear the words of the wise. Here begins a formal exordium, running to verse 21, that marks the inception of a new collection of proverbs that comprises two subunits, 22:22–23:11 and 23:12–24:22. The first of these sub-units, as most scholars for nearly a century have agreed, is an adaptation of an Egyptian Wisdom text, the Instruction of Amenemope, and thus bears witness to the international circulation of Wisdom literature. Fifteen of its twenty-four verses have notable parallels in Amenemope, and some of the sequencing of the proverbs is the same. In all likelihood, the Egyptian text was first translated into Aramaic, perhaps in the seventh century B.C.E., by which time Aramaic had become a diplomatic lingua franca in the Near East. Elite circles in Israel at this point certainly knew Aramaic, and so an adaptation from the Aramaic to Hebrew would have been perfectly likely. It is notable that the Hebrew of this section incorporates a number of Aramaic usages.
20. thirty things. The Masoretic Text has shalishim (“captains”?) in the ketiv (consonantal text) and shelishim (“threes”?) in the qeri (marginal gloss). Neither makes sense, and the translation adopts Michael V. Fox’s persuasive emendation to sheloshim. Amenemope has thirty maxims, and there are thirty maxims in this subunit, if one counts the exordium as the first maxim.
21. the utmost true sayings. The Hebrew strings together synonyms, qosht (a borrowing from Aramaic, meaning “truth”), ʾimrey ʾemet (“sayings of truth”), with an effect of emphasis or intensification.
22. do not crush the poor in the gate. The gate was where courts of justice were held, and the sense of subverting the legal rights of the poor is spelled out in the first verset of the next line.
24. a hotheaded person. The Hebrew ʾish-ḥeimot is unusual as an idiom but, Fox informs us, is a direct translation of the Egyptian phrase.
27. why should your bedding be taken from under you. As the law in Exodus 22:25–26 makes clear, the poor man’s bedding was the cloak in which he wrapped himself for sleep—hence one is forbidden to take it away from him at night in pawn for a debt. A letter on behalf of a laborer, found at Yavneh Yam, and dating from the seventh century B.C.E., complains about the deprivation of the cloak for debt. The Hebrew seems to say “why should he take your bedding,” but the third-person masculine singular is often used as the equivalent of a passive and thus is translated here as a passive.
28. Do not shift the age-old boundary stone. This injunction, which has a close parallel in the Egyptian source-text, reflects the general view that real property should be inalienable.
29. quick at his task. The Hebrew adjective mahir suggests, as in a number of other occurrences, “adept” or “skilled.”
the lowly. A more literal rendering of the Hebrew ḥashukhim would be “the obscure,” but the sense is not that they lack fame but rather that, unlike kings, they have no social standing.