CHAPTER 30
1The words of Agur, son of Yaqeh, the oracle, utterance of the man, to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Ukhal.
2For I am a brute among men,
and no human discernment have I.
3I have not learned wisdom,
nor the knowledge of the holy ones do I know.
4Who has gone up to the heavens and come down,
who has scooped up the wind in his palms?
Who has wrapped up the waters in a cloak.
Who has raised up all ends of the earth?
What is his name or the name of his son,
That you should know?
5Every saying of God is pure,
He is a shield to all who shelter in Him.
6Add nothing to His words,
lest He rebuke you and you be given the lie.
7Two things I have asked of You,
do not withhold them from me before I die.
8Falsehood and lying words keep far from me.
Privation and wealth do not give me.
9Lest I be sated and I renounce,
and I say, “Who is the LORD?”
And lest I lose all and I steal
and profane the name of my God.
10Do not denounce a slave to his master,
lest he revile you and you bear guilt.
11A generation that reviles its father
and its mother it does not bless.
12A generation that is pure in its eyes
though it has not been washed of its filth.
13A generation, how haughty its eyes,
and its eyelids, how arrogant.
14A generation whose teeth are swords,
to devour the lowly from the earth
and the impoverished from humankind.
15aThe leech has two daughters: “Give!” “Give!”
Three things are there that are not sated,
15bfour that do not say, “Enough!”:
16Sheol and a blocked womb,
the earth unsated with water
and fire, which does not say “Enough!”
17An eye that mocks a father
and scorns submission to a mother,
the rooks of the river will gouge it,
and the eagle’s young will devour it.
18Three things are there too wondrous for me,
and four that I cannot know:
19the eagle’s way in the heavens,
the way of the snake on a rock,
the ship’s way in the heart of the sea,
and the way of a man in a young woman.
20This is the way of an adulterous woman—
and says, “I did nothing wrong.”
21For three things does the earth shudder,
and for four, it cannot bear it:
22for a slave who rules
and a scoundrel who is sated with bread,
23for a hateful woman in the marriage bed,
and a slavegirl who dispossesses her mistress.
24Four things are the smallest on earth,
yet they are the very wisest:
25the ants, a people not strong,
who ready their bread in the summer,
26the badgers, a people not mighty,
who make their home in the cleft,
27the locusts, who have no king,
28the spider, who can be caught with hands,
yet is in the palace of kings.
29Three things stride handsomely
and four things handsomely walk:
30the lion, mightiest of beasts,
who does not turn back from anything,
31the rooster and the he-goat,
and the king against whom none can stand.
32If you have been a scoundrel in arrogance,
and if you have schemed—put a hand on your mouth!
33For squeezed milk produces butter,
and a squeezed nose produces blood,
and squeezed patience produces a quarrel.
CHAPTER 30 NOTES
Click here to advance to the next section of the text.
1. The words of Agur. As this heading makes clear, the unit that follows (which probably ends with verse 9) is distinct from the rest of the Book of Proverbs. The two terms that follow, “oracle,” masaʾ, and “utterance,” neʾum, are usually reserved for vatic or prophetic speech, a kind of discourse uncharacteristic of Proverbs. What follows is a first-person, incipiently confessional statement unlike anything that has preceded in this book. The name Agur is otherwise unattested.
to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Ukhal. These names, and the repetition, are enigmatic. Many scholars revocalize them and change the word divisions of the consonantal text to yield three verbs. Thus Fox proposes the following: “I am weary, God, / I am weary, and have wasted away.” Although it is possible that this was the original reading in the Hebrew, there is no warrant for it in the ancient versions, and it remains conjectural.
3. I have not learned wisdom. This proclamation is a counterpoint to the prevailing emphasis of Proverbs. Agur, humbly aware of his limitations before a transcendent God (see the next verse), says in effect that any wisdom he might have pretended to attain amounts to nothing.
the knowledge of the holy ones. While an exegetical tradition going back to the Middle Ages understands qedoshim as “the Holy One,” the Hebrew noun is plural. It is true that the most common name for God, ʾelohim, is plural in form though singular in meaning, but the evidence that qedoshim works in the same way is not altogether convincing. The most likely reference would be to angelic beings.
4. Who has gone up to the heavens and come down. Only someone who could negotiate this trajectory, patently impossible for mortal man, would be capable of achieving divine wisdom.
the waters . . . / the earth. These are the two principal elements of the biblical cosmogony.
What is his name or the name of his son. This formulation has obviously invited Christological readings that would not have been within the purview of the Hebrew poet, writing several centuries before the emergence of Christian doctrine. In the patrilineal society of ancient Israel, a man’s full name was his given name and the name of his father (for example, Isaiah son of Amoz), as in our society it is the given name and the family name.
6. Add nothing to His words. This injunction is in keeping with Deuteronomy 4:2. The burden of this verse and the preceding one is a pious counterweight (perhaps for that reason appealing to the editor) to the idea of wisdom as a kind of craft with human instructors that predominates in the book: all wisdom comes from God through His revealed words, and no mere human should tamper with them.
7. do not withhold them from me before I die. This existential urgency is of a piece with Agur’s distinctive confessional mode.
8. Provide me my allotted bread. This clause does not constitute a third thing but is simply the condition to which Agur aspires after his two wishes are granted—freedom from false-hood, neither privation nor wealth—and then he will be content with a modest material sufficiency.
9. Lest I be sated and I renounce. Too many worldly goods may lead a person to feel he has no need for God. Compare Deuteronomy 32:15.
And lest I lose all and I steal / and profane the name of my God. These words sketch out a miniature narrative: first the person dismisses God as he revels in his abundant possessions; then he becomes impoverished and resorts to crime, thus profaning God’s name.
10. Do not denounce a slave to his master. This proverb, in the form of a negative injunction, is unlike the words of Agur in form and substance and also could not belong to the “generation” sequence that begins in the next verse. An editor may have inserted it here because, like both lines of verse 9, it has a “lest” clause.
11. A generation that reviles its father. Here begins an independent unit of four verses (five lines of poetry) that deploys “a generation” as an emphatic anaphora at the beginning of every line but the last. The content is purely denunciatory, in a style reminiscent of the Prophets, and there is nothing here but negative characterizations of the generation in a series of subordinate clauses, with no actual grammatical predicate.
12. filth. The Hebrew tsoʾah implies excremental filth, though it is not really scatological.
14. meat cleavers. The relatively rare term maʾakhelet (also used in the story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22) is not an ordinary knife but the kind of knife used to butcher meat.
15a. The leech has two daughters. This succinct aphorism is restricted to a single verset. One should probably assume, as most commentators have, that there is an implied human referent—a greedy person, or perhaps a greedy woman, because the Hebrew for “leech” is a feminine noun. Some interpreters see the two daughters as a reference to the two suckers of the leech.
15a–15b. Three things . . . / four. This little numerical progression is traditional in a certain line of biblical poetry. Compare Amos 1:3: “For three trespasses of Damascus / and for four I will not turn it back.”
16. Sheol and a blocked womb. A parallelism between Sheol (the biblical netherworld) and the womb appears elsewhere in biblical poetry. H. N. Bialik, the great modern Hebrew poet, in a poem expressing revulsion after a sexual encounter with a woman, refers to her “hidden treasures that like Sheol cannot be sated.” Here, Sheol is never sated with the dead, always wanting more, and the blocked womb, in an ironic antithesis, is never satisfied with its condition of barrenness, always hungry to produce life.
19. heavens / . . . rock / . . . sea / . . . young woman. There is a kind of wry wit in this sequence. The speaker imagines bird, reptile, and vessel passing through the remote regions of sky, earth, and sea that are beyond his ken. Then the fourth term invokes another place inaccessible to the imagination of the male speaker—a woman’s sexual mystery, known only to her lover. The preposition “in” here before “a young woman” is meant to be understood literally—that is, in a physiological sense—as many interpreters through the ages have in fact understood it.
20. This is the way of the adulterous woman. This worldly observation interrupts the series of three-four sayings. It may have been inserted here because of “the way” and because of the sexual reference at the end of the preceding verse.
she eats and wipes her mouth. Elsewhere in Proverbs, an analogy between mouth and vagina is implied (for example, chapter 5).
23. for a hateful woman in the marriage bed. In the Hebrew, “in the marriage bed” is a passive verb, which means “is married/is sexually possessed.” Fox’s proposal to revocalize the verb tibaʿel as tivʿal and to understand it as “gain mastery” is unconvincing because b-ʿ-l does not appear in this sense as an intransitive verb elsewhere (despite the noun baʿal, which does mean “master” as well as “husband”). The transitive verb generally has the sexual sense indicated above. The hateful woman enjoying conjugal consummation is part of a series of figures whose fate is disturbingly not what it should be, after the slave who rules and the scoundrel who prospers, and before the slavegirl who dispossesses her mistress.
24. smallest on earth, / yet they are the very wisest. Though diminutive in size, they evince wisdom in how they dispose themselves. This proverb thus celebrates the value of wisdom over sheer size or strength and implies that people should learn from these small creatures.
27. march out all in a row. While it is questionable whether locusts assemble themselves in such neat formation, the idea is suggested by the perception of the mass of locusts as an invading army that sweeps away everything in its path, despite the smallness of its individual constituents.
28. the spider. There is some doubt about the identity of this creature. In any case, it is something small and easily caught, probably some sort of insect, that nevertheless is able to do what no ordinary human can: penetrate the palaces of kings.
the palace of kings. The Hebrew has a plural for “palace” and a singular for “kings.”
31. the rooster. The Hebrew zarzir has been identified with several different creatures. Compounding the puzzle, it is attached here to the noun motnayim, “loins,” and nobody has come up with a satisfactory explanation of this epithet, if that is what it is.
33. For squeezed milk. This entire verse has the ring of a folk saying. The term myts, “squeezed” (literally “squeezing [of]”), has been stretched in this saying to cover the churning of milk, though that is not its usual meaning.
patience. Some understand the Hebrew ʾapayim to mean “wrath.” The singular form ʾaf means precisely that, but the doublative ʾapayim (when it does not mean face) appears only in the idiom ʾerekh ʾapayim, “patience” (literally, “long [or slow] in anger”). That idiom, in fact, occurs several times in Proverbs. If you push milk hard, it turns into something else, butter; if you push a nose hard, it spurts blood, something that does not usually come out of a nose; and if you push someone’s patience hard, it turns into impatience, leading to a quarrel.