CHAPTER 23
1When you sit to break bread with a ruler,
understand well what is before you,
2and put a knife to your gullet,
if you are a gluttonous man.
3Do not crave his delicacies,
4Do not strain to become rich,
through your understanding, leave off.
5Let your eyes but fly over it, it is gone,
for it will surely sprout wings,
like an eagle fly off to the heavens.
6Do not break bread with a stingy man,
nor crave his delicacies.
7For like one who gauges in his mind, so he is.
“Eat and drink,” he will say to you,
but his heart is not with you.
8Your crust that you eat you will vomit,
and you will ruin your pleasant words.
9In a fool’s ears do not speak,
for he will despise the insight of your words.
10Do not shift the age-old boundary stone,
nor enter the fields of orphans.
11For their redeemer is strong,
he will argue their case against you.
12Bring your heart to reproof,
and your ear to sayings of truth.
13Do not hold back reproof from a lad,
when you strike him with the rod, he won’t die.
14You, with the rod you should strike him
15My son, if your heart gets wisdom,
my heart, too, will rejoice,
16and my inward parts will exult
when your lips speak uprightness.
17Let your heart not envy offenders,
but in fear of the LORD all day long.
18For if you keep it, there is a future,
and your hope will not be cut off.
19Listen, my son, and get wisdom,
and make your heart go straight on the way.
20Do not be with the guzzlers of wine,
with those who gorge on meat.
21For the guzzler and gorger will lose all,
and slumber will clothe him in rags.
22Listen to your father who begot you,
nor despise your mother when she grows old.
23Get truth and do not sell it,
wisdom, reproof, and discernment.
24The righteous man’s father will surely be gladdened,
the wise man’s begetter rejoices in him.
25Your father and mother rejoice,
and she who bore you will be gladdened.
26Pay mind, my son, to me,
and let your eyes keep my ways.
27For a whore is a deep ditch,
and a narrow well, the stranger-woman.
28Why, like a kidnapper she lies in wait,
and sweeps up the traitors among men.
29For whom “alack,” for whom “alas,”
for whom strife, for whom complaint?
For whom needless wounds,
30For those who linger over wine,
who come to try mixed drink.
31Do not regard wine in its redness,
when it shows its hue in the cup,
32In the end it bites like a snake,
and like a viper spews its poison.
33Your eyes will see strange things,
and your heart will speak perverseness,
34and you will be like one who beds in the sea,
who beds on the top of the rigging.
35“They struck me—I felt no hurt;
they beat me—I was unaware.
I will look for it again.”
CHAPTER 23 NOTES
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2. put a knife to your gullet. This admonition not to gorge oneself when dining with the powerful has numerous parallels in Egyptian Wisdom literature.
3. they are bread of lies. The powerful man may seem to be showering you with hospitality in laying out a grand spread before you, but he has his own calculations, and a guest who eats too eagerly may come to regret it.
4. through your understanding, leave off. Though the Hebrew is a bit cryptic, this may be the most plausible construction: use your good sense not to strive excessively for wealth. Fox understands this as “Leave off your staring,” but construing the noun binah as “staring” is somewhat strained, even though the cognate verb sometimes means “to consider” or “to regard.”
5. over it. The antecedent is an implied noun, “wealth.”
7. but his heart is not with you. The stingy host, like the ruler, may make a gesture of hospitality, but what he has in mind is anything but generosity. The vivid image of vomiting in the verse that follows may suggest that he will offer his guest questionable food—say, three-day-old fish that has begun to go bad—which he has bought at a very cheap price.
11. For their redeemer is strong. Many understand this as a reference to God, Who protects the helpless orphans in their plight. “Redeemer,” goʾel, is a judicial term (this is how it is used in Job and in Ruth), and so it could refer here to a human redeemer, some hitherto unknown kinsman who will come forth and battle for the rights of the orphan.
12. Bring your heart to reproof. This very general admonition signals the beginning of another collection of sayings, but not from Amenemope. As Fox points out, sundry other Egyptian sources are tapped.
14. save his life from Sheol. The insistence here and elsewhere on vigorous corporal punishment is linked to the fear of the dire consequences for failing to discipline a young person. Because he will either become involved in dangerous activities or be punished by God, his swerving from the right path can lead to his death.
16. inward parts. The literal sense of the Hebrew is “kidneys” (hence the King James Version’s “reins”), thought to be the seat of conscience.
17. but in fear of the LORD all day long. The Hebrew seems to imply an elided verb such as “dwell.” Some scholars emend this phrase to “fearers of the LORD,” but envy seems the wrong attitude toward such people.
18. if you keep it. The Hebrew lacks a verb, and the translation follows the Septuagint, which has a verb to this effect, evidently based on a Hebrew text that showed tishemrena. The antecedent of “it,” a feminine suffix in the Hebrew, would be “fear of the LORD” in the previous line.
19. make your heart go straight on the way. The verb ʾasher means literally “make strides,” though, as Fox suggests, it probably puns both on yashar, “straight,” and on its other sense, to declare someone fortunate.
21. slumber will clothe him in rags. The Hebrew does not specify an object for the verb, but, contrary to many interpreters, it would have to be the glutton and drunkard, now seen lying in a sated stupor and thus neglecting his possessions, which he comes to lose.
26. keep. The translation adopts the correction of the marginal qeri. The text proper, reversing the consonants of the verb, erroneously reads “be pleased with.”
27. whore . . . / stranger-woman. These are complementary possibilities of dangerous liaisons, the prostitute and the adulteress. Each is a trap into which a foolish man can tumble, with the sexual sense of “ditch” and “well” manifest. Chapter 5 offers a contrasting image of conjugal sexuality as a pure well.
28. a kidnapper. The Hebrew ḥetef is odd but derives from a verbal stem that means “to snatch.”
sweeps up. The verb tosif, elsewhere meaning “to increase,” here seems to derive, as many commentators have concluded, from ʾasaf, “to take away” or “gather up.”
traitors. At least here, the double standard for sexual behavior is not applied: the married men who frequent promiscuous women are traitors to their own wives, and their involvement with the adulterers will lead them to a bad end.
29. For whom. This interrogative phrase, which could equally be rendered as “who has?,” begins an extended riddle form: only at the end of the second line here, with the reference to bloodshot eyes, is there an explicit hint that the object of all these mishaps is the drunkard, whose identity is then spelled out in the next verse.
31. in its redness. Literally, “as it shows red.”
going down smoothly. The phrase yithalekh bemeysharim is elucidated by its use in Song of Songs 7:10 in reference to the beloved’s palate, which is “like goodly wine.” Amusingly, the language of this verse in Proverbs, intended as a warning against wine, is repeatedly used in the Hebrew drinking poems of medieval Andalusia as a celebration of the glories of wine.
33. Your eyes will see strange things. The hallucinations and mental confusion of drunkenness are the snakebite of the drink.
34. like one who beds in the sea, / who beds on the top of the rigging. The simile provides a striking satiric image of the wobbliness of the drunkard. In a characteristic move of intensification from the first verset to the second, the drunken person is not merely like someone trying to sleep in the surging sea but like someone lying up in the rigging as the ship pitches about.
35. They struck me—I felt no hurt. The drinker is too stupefied by alcohol to realize that he has been beaten. These words loop back to the riddle question, “For whom needless wounds?”
When will I awake? / I will look for it again. At the end of this satiric vignette, the alcoholic remains true to his addiction: still in a half-stupor as he pronounces these words, he is in no condition to go out and get more wine, but as soon as his mind clears a bit, that is just what he means to do.