Introduction

Although Proverbs, in contrast to Job and Qohelet, strikes certain recurrent notes of traditional piety and evinces great confidence in a rational moral order that dependably produces concrete rewards for virtue and wisdom, it is in some ways, like Job and Qohelet, not altogether a likely book for inclusion in the canon. The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 30B) in fact brackets Proverbs with Qohelet as a text that perhaps might have been excluded from the canon—in particular because it contains contradictory assertions. The sequence of verses 4 and 5 in chapter 26 is a vivid case in point: “Do not answer a dolt by his folly / lest you, too, be like him. /Answer the dolt by his folly, / lest he seem wise in his own eyes.” What, then, the earnest reader may wonder, is one to do about answering a dolt? It is probably misguided to argue for a dialectic or subtly complementary relationship between these two admonitions. The contradiction between them stems from the anthological character of the book: the two sayings have been culled either from folk-tradition or from the verbal repertory of Wisdom schools and have been set in immediate sequence by the anthologist because of the identical wording—first in the negative and then in the positive—of the initial clause of each saying.

The Book of Proverbs is not merely an anthology but an anthology of anthologies. It is made up of six discrete units, each marked editorially as such at the beginning, with notable differences of emphasis and style among the units. chapters 1–9 form a kind of general prologue to the subject of the instruction of wisdom. Michael V. Fox, in his two indispensable Proverbs volumes in the Anchor Bible Series, argues persuasively that this first unit was the last one composed, either in the Persian period or in the Hellenistic period. It is strikingly different from the collections of one-line, two-verset proverbs that follow in deploying poems that extend to all or a good part of a chapter. These include the vivid narrative about the seductress that takes up chapter 7 and the allegorical representation of Lady Wisdom in chapter 8 and of the contrasting figures of Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly in chapter 9. The recurring theme in this initial unit that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom also sets it apart from the subsequent collections, in which wisdom is more typically thought of without theological trappings as a transmissible human craft. Finally, the prominence here of the Mentor and the inexperienced youth he seeks to instruct recedes or disappears as the book moves on to the one-line proverbs.

The second grouping, introduced like the first with the phrase “the proverbs of Solomon,” runs from the beginning of chapter 10 to 22:Many scholars think that this double ascription of the book to Solomon, celebrated in 1 Kings 5:12 for his prodigious production of proverbs, may have encouraged its inclusion in the canon, though that claim is hard to assess. In the one-line proverb, the symmetrical logic of poetic parallelism predominates, with most of the proverbs exhibiting either neatly matching statements in the two versets or emphatic antitheses. After this unit, which is the longest collection in the anthology of anthologies, a short unit begins that is marked with the exhortation “Bend your ear and hear the words of the wise,” the phrase “the words of the wise” evidently serving as a kind of title. This grouping provides the most vivid evidence of the international character of Wisdom literature because a large part of it, as scholars have long recognized, is a recasting of the Instruction of Amenemope, a second-millennium B.C.E. Egyptian text, which may have reached the Hebrew writer through the mediation of an Aramaic version. After this, 24:23 begins with the declaration, “These, too, are from the wise,” which indicates a new source, of which perhaps only a fragment is included because it ends or breaks off after eleven verses.

The first verse of chapter 25 then provides a valuable historical clue about the editorial process of these collections: “These, too, are the proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah transcribed.” Hezekiah reigned in Jerusalem in the late decades of the eighth century B.C.E. The men of Hezekiah would have been court scribes, and in fact there is a good deal of emphasis in this unit, which runs to the end of chapter 29, on kings and how one should comport oneself in their presence. The verb “transcribed,” heʿetiqu, does not imply original composition but rather an activity such as collating and copying or transferring from another source, which means that the original formulation of at least some of these proverbs might have occurred generations, perhaps even quite a few generations, before the time of Hezekiah, however unlikely the ascription to Solomon.

Finally, chapters 30 and 31 comprise, as Fox aptly calls them, a series of four “appendices” to the book proper. Each is quite different in style and emphasis from everything that precedes it in the completed anthology, and though the appendices are clearly drawn from different literary sources, there is no confident way of concluding whether they are later sources or just exotic ones. The first appendix, 30:1–14, is “The words of Agur, son of Yaqeh,” a figure about whom nothing is known. The style is vatic, and the idea that God alone possesses wisdom runs counter to the prevailing notion in the rest of the book of wisdom as a teachable craft. The second appendix (30:15–33) is made up of a series of riddling epigrams cast in a three-four numerical pattern (“Three things are there that are not sated, / four that do not say, ‘Enough!’ ”) occasionally found elsewhere in biblical poetry and ultimately going back to Canaanite poetic style. The third appendix, 31:1–9, “The words of Lemuel, king of Massa,” is a set of instructions of a queen mother to her royal son. At the very end of the book (31:10–31), we have an alphabetic acrostic poem celebrating the ideal wife—an interesting editorial choice for the conclusion of a book that has featured male mentors instructing young men and has repeatedly warned against seductresses and complained of shrewish wives.

The Book of Proverbs, then, is by no means cut from whole cloth, and consequently generalizations about its outlook and literary character will not hold for all parts of the anthology. By and large, the underlying conception of wisdom is thoroughly pragmatic, and, in keeping with the characteristic direction of Wisdom literature, it does not reflect particular Israelite interests. The recurring term torah does not refer to any divinely inspired text but simply means “teaching” or “instruction” and is closely coordinated with the constantly reiterated musar, “reproof” or “discipline.” This basically untheological orientation, in which neither revelation nor covenant has any role, might conceivably have been another potential obstacle to the book’s inclusion in the canon that was nevertheless over-come by the rabbinic sages. (The one brief component of the anthology that does sound fully “canonical” in this regard is Agur’s pious poem exalting God’s transcendent greatness and affirming the nullity of human wisdom.)

The book is poetry from end to end, but what kind of poetry is it? In line with its composite nature, it is not the same in all its segments. The acrostic poem at the end praising the “worthy woman” is a rapid sequence of narrative vignettes exhibiting the good woman in a chain of energetic actions on behalf of her household, acquiring flax and wool and weaving them, rising before daybreak to set out on her rounds of commerce, and so forth. The poems of the first nine chapters abound in incipiently narrative developments—Lady Wisdom calling out from the heights to invite the throngs to attend to her instruction, the Mentor spelling out step by step the disasters to which the Stranger Woman (presumably, a lascivious married woman) will lead a young man, the antithetical evocation in an extended metaphor of the delights of conjugal love.

The large central core of the book, however, from chapter 10 to the end of chapter 29, which gathers together one-line proverbs from a variety of sources, is the part of the book in which the poetry is liable to pose the greatest difficulties for modern readers. The one-line proverbs are either didactic admonitions or, somewhat less frequently, observations about social and ethical behavior. Some of the sayings in the second category are quite shrewd and evince lively satiric perceptions. The admonitions, on the other hand, show a good deal of predictability, founded as they are on what the writers assume to be tried-and-true principles for guiding a person through life. As a result, the poetry is sometimes boilerplate language, a rehearsal of traditional formulas. This is a limitation that the author of Job, perhaps the most original of biblical poets, obviously noticed, putting in the mouths of the three friends many complacent pronouncements about the rightness of the moral order that sound like this line from Proverbs (10:3): “The LORD will not make the righteous man hunger, / but He rebuffs the desire of the wicked.” Poetry in all cultures serves a mnemonic function—in systems that have rhyme, the rhyme helps you remember the line that comes after its rhyming counterpart. In the semantic parallelism of biblical poetry, the match in meaning (and often in rhythm and syntax) helps you remember the second verset after the first. If there were in fact Wisdom schools in ancient Israel, it is easy enough to imagine how the formulation of ethical and pragmatic principles in poetry helped students to memorize them. Thus, the line “Cheating scales are the LORD’s loathing, / and a true weight-stone His pleasure” (11:1) occurs several times with minor variations. Unlike the sundry claims about the righteous and the wicked, it is unassailable as an ethical principle. One would hardly call it great poetry, but the poetic parallelism does serve to inscribe the saying in memory with the aim of being a kind of ethical prophylaxis: should you ever be tempted to enhance your profits in a sale of goods by using a crooked scale or an underweight marked stone, this saying is meant to come to mind and dissuade you.

Many other proverbs are grounded not in ethics but in purely prudential considerations, such as the reiterated exhortations not to give your bond for someone you don’t know—for example, “He will surely be shattered who gives bond for a stranger, / but he who hates offering pledge is secure” (11:15). Here, too, the rather mechanical parallelism is an aid to memory, serving a prophylactic function in the economic sphere rather than in the ethical realm. The least interesting of the proverbs, as the one just cited may suggest, amount to poetic formulations of truisms. It seems scarcely necessary, for example, to be reminded, as we are by several different proverbs, that warfare needs to be conducted with considered strategy and expert military advisors, or that a person too lazy to provide for himself will end up in want.

This last instance of the lazy man, however, also illustrates how poetry in the Book of Proverbs often goes beyond a purely mnemonic function to serve as a vehicle of enlivening perception. Within the tight formal constraints of the one-line aphorism, dynamic and revelatory relationships emerge between the two halves of the line, generating what I have elsewhere called a poetry of wit. (The frequent celebrations in the book of the power of language invite from the audience a fine attentiveness to the play of language in the poetry.) Very often in biblical poetry, the second verset does not simply echo the first verset, as it does in the three lines quoted above, but instead introduces some sort of heightening or focusing development of it, which in Proverbs frequently is a small surprise or discovery. “A door turns on its hinge, / and a sluggard on his bed” (26:14). Here, as in many other proverbs, the relation between the first verset and the second is that of a riddle to its solution. That is, the assertion in the first half of the line is either so obvious (of course, a door turns on its hinge) that one wonders why it needs to be said at all, or it is perplexing, which makes one wonder for a different reason. The second half of the line then provides a sharply focused (and sometimes satirical) explanation. In this instance, the sluggard is revealed turning back and forth on his bed and getting nowhere, like the door, while the comparison also invites us to think of the contrast between people going in and out of the doorway as the door opens and closes and the sluggard unwilling to move from his bed. Here is a different riddle-proverb about the lazy man, in which the riddling first verset is enigmatic, to be explained in the second verset: “Like vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes, / thus the sluggard to those who send him” (10:26). In formulations of this sort, the riddle form of the line is especially prominent: What is as noxious or irritating as vinegar to the teeth and smoke to the eyes?—a lazy man whom you have the misfortune to use on an errand. A third proverb on the sluggard illustrates the lively variety of the riddle form. The line begins, “The sluggard hides his hand in the dish.” This action sounds bizarre, and one wonders why anyone would want to do such a thing. Then the second half of the line explains, “he won’t even bring it up to his mouth” (19:24). This is, of course, an extravagant and amusing satiric hyperbole: the man is so lazy that, having plunged his hand into the dish, he is incapable of exerting the effort required to bring the food to his mouth. Thus, the fantastically exaggerated image becomes a representation of how laziness leads to a failure to provide for one’s own basic needs, a notion couched in more realistic terms, such as having nothing to harvest when crops are not planted, in other proverbs.

The satiric perspective, to round out this sampling of proverbs on the sluggard, is not limited to riddling but can be brought to bear through a technique of miniaturist caricature: “The sluggard said, ‘A lion’s outside / in the square. I shall be murdered!’” (22:13). These words, of course, are a trumped-up excuse for his not leaving his house (or, perhaps, his bed): in the wonderful extravagance of the dialogue that the poet puts in the mouth of the sluggard, he fears that the fictitious lion prowling in the streets threatens not to devour but to murder him, as though it were a malevolent assassin and not merely a beast of prey.

Many of the proverbs set out an antithesis between the first verset and the second, and the tight confines of the one-line aphorism often generate a powerful energy of assertion in the antithesis. Thus: “A worthy woman is her husband’s crown, / but like rot in his bones a shameful wife” (12:4). The first verset praising the good wife verges on platitude, but then the antithetical second verset produces a small shock: a crown is a noble thing yet also an external ornament (perhaps an allusion to the fortunate husband’s enhanced reputation); rot in the bones is something internal, and devastating. This whole effect is strongly reinforced by the antithetical chiasm: worthy woman (a), crown (b), bone-rot (b'), shaming woman (a'). Sometimes, the contrasting second verset takes on a surprising vividness against the foil of the first verset: “Drawn-out longing sickens the heart, / but desire come true is a tree of life” (13:12). By itself, the second clause might seem a bland truism, but after the sickening of the heart of unfulfilled desire, it conveys a strong sense of how sustaining it is to have one’s longings consummated. In some antithetical proverbs, there is also narrative development from the first verset to the second: “Bread got through fraud may be sweet to a man, / but in the end it fills his mouth with gravel” (20:17). The idea that pleasures reaped through wrongful acts will eventually be followed by a comeuppance for the wrongdoer is a cliché of Wisdom literature. Here, however, the powerfully concrete image of delectable food that turns into a mouthful of gravel endows the familiar idea with poetic force.

A traditional proverb pattern that occurs with some frequency in the collection is “better x” (first verset) “than y” (second verset). This is actually a variation on the antithetically structured line and similarly draws its expressive power from the bold juxtaposition of opposites. Here are two characteristic examples: “Better a meal of greens where there is love / than a fatted ox where there is hatred” (15:17) and “Better a dry crust with tranquillity / than a house filled with feasting and quarrel” (17:1). Although some of these proverbs may give the impression of the rehearsal of rote learning, many others—perhaps the two instances just cited among them—are arresting not just because of the concise poetic wit but also because they appear to derive from shrewd and considered reflection on moral behavior and human nature and sometimes from introspection as well. If some of these maxims may seem too pat, one is startled to come across this proverb: “The heart knows its own bitterness, / and in its joy no stranger mingles” (14:10). The book as a whole, after all, works on the assumption that knowledge and experience are eminently transmissible and teachable and that everyone draws on the same fund of set moral principles. In this instance, however, the anthologists have included a very different perception—that each person’s experience is ultimately incommensurable, that one’s inward sorrows and delights have no adequate reflection in the lexicon of the social realm. Occasionally, despite the general adherence of the collection to moral certitude, one encounters a proverb that registers the stubborn ambiguity of human experience, as in this densely packed line: “Like water face to face / thus the heart of man to man” (27:19). The first verset evidently means to say that water gives back a person his own reflected image, and so the second verset would seem to assert that a man may know the heart of another by pondering what is in his own heart. But water, after all, is an unstable mirror, its surface liable to be troubled by wind or tide, its chromatic layers darkening or transforming the image, and hence the reflection of heart to heart may be a tricky or undependable business.

Rendering these pithy Hebrew maxims in English presents a special challenge. The distinctive lexical stamp of the Book of Proverbs is marked by its use of a set of overlapping terms for wisdom on the one hand and for foolishness or stupidity on the other. Michael V. Fox has exerted heroic scholarly effort to make nice distinctions among these approximate synonyms, but it is doubtful that the precise semantic contours of each of the recurring terms can be recovered with much confidence. The general term for wisdom is ḥokhmah, which has a practical orientation, being used in other contexts for the “wise” application of a craft by a skilled worker, but which in chapters 8 and 9 is given cosmic resonance. Three other terms, ʿormah, mezimah, and taḥbulah, usually have connotations of calculation, shrewdness, or cunning, here put in a positive light. Of the sundry terms for the lack of wisdom, the one that has a clear connotation is peti, represented in this translation as “dupe,” because it derives from a verbal root associated with seduction and hence suggests gullibility. By and large, the present translation uses the same English equivalent for each member of these two clusters of related terms, although there are moments when the immediate context has necessitated abandoning consistency.

The more pervasive challenge to the translator of Proverbs is that the expressive vigor of these sayings depends to such a large degree on their wonderful compactness, an effect reinforced by sound-play (alliteration, assonance, an occasional ad hoc internal rhyme). Most of this sound-play inevitably disappears in the English, though some efforts have been made in this version to reproduce it, at least approximately. Because of the fundamental structural difference between biblical Hebrew and modern English, it often takes eight to ten words to say in English what is expressed in four Hebrew words. There is no escape from this linguistic quandary, but I have sought to narrow the gap between the two languages by avoiding (with just a few exceptions) polysyllabic words, by trying wherever possible to keep the number of accents—typically, three per verset—close to that in the Hebrew, and by reproducing something of the compression of formulation of the Hebrew without resort to explanatory or paraphrastic maneuvers in the translation. However imperfect the results, I would hope these procedures will bring readers closer than do earlier English versions to the concise forcefulness of the Hebrew. The speed, the occasional abruptness, the gnomic character of the original seem worth emulating—hence renderings such as “like water face to face / so the heart of man to man.”