Proverbs
31 Chapters
Proverbs: The Whole Book, Chapter by Chapter
Two Voices in the Street
The Book of Proverbs opens by defining wisdom as an education that joins understanding to justice, judgment, and equity. The wise are not graduates from instruction but people who keep listening. That lesson is tested immediately by competing invitations. Parents offer teaching as honorable adornment, while violent companions offer fellowship, profit, and a common purse. Their promised gain is exposed as a trap whose hunters become their own prey. Wisdom then takes the opposite setting: she speaks openly in streets, gathering places, and gates. Her reproof is paired with an offer to make her words known. The chapter closes by showing refusal becoming a harvest. The complacent and the teachable may both appear peaceful for a time, but they are resting on different foundations.
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Wisdom Becomes a Guard for the Road
Chapter 2 turns the public call of Wisdom into the learner's own pursuit. A chain of conditions describes receiving, retaining, crying out for, and searching after understanding as though it were hidden treasure. Yet the chapter refuses to make wisdom a human achievement detached from God: the LORD is its giver and source. Once received inwardly, wisdom becomes protection. It trains the hearer to recognize two dangerous forms of speech, the crooked talk of men who delight in evil and the flattering words of a woman whose path leaves covenant faithfulness. Both dangers are roads before they are disasters. The chapter therefore closes positively, not merely with escape. Wisdom places the learner among good people on a path that has somewhere to remain, while faithlessness proves unable to provide a lasting home.
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Trust Reaches the Cupboard and the Neighbor
Trust in the LORD reaches every scale of life in chapter 3. The heart is told to remember mercy and truth, the mind is warned against making its own judgment self-sufficient, possessions are ordered through firstfruits, and correction is received within the relationship of a father who delights in his son. Wisdom is then valued beyond precious goods because it belongs to the order by which the LORD established earth and heaven. That cosmic scale does not leave ordinary life behind. The chapter returns to walking, sleeping, sudden fear, a neighbor at the door, and good already available in one's hand. Violence may look effective enough to envy, but the final assessment of honor belongs to the LORD. Trust becomes visible in worship, judgment, rest, restraint, and the refusal to postpone help that can already be given.
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A Lesson Passed from One Generation to the Next
Chapter 4 gives wisdom a family history. The father who teaches first remembers being a child who was taught, so instruction is received before it is passed on. Wisdom is not merely collected but loved, embraced, retained, and given a place of honor. The chapter then returns to its favorite geography: competing roads. One path brightens toward full day, while the other leaves its travelers unable even to identify what trips them. Finally the focus tightens from generations and roads to the body itself. Words enter through ear and eye and settle in the heart, then the mouth, gaze, and feet must all face the same direction. The result is not inward intention detached from conduct. A guarded heart becomes visible as coordinated speech, attention, judgment, and movement.
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Sweet Words, Bitter Ends, and a Faithful Fountain
Chapter 5 does not oppose pleasure to wisdom. It opposes a sweet beginning whose end is bitter to faithful delight whose intensity is openly welcomed. The forbidden woman's words are smooth enough to conceal the direction of her path, so the father repeatedly asks the son to judge the invitation by its destination. The imagined cost spreads far beyond a private moment, consuming honor, labor, wealth, bodily strength, and public standing. The chapter then gives marital joy its own abundance of water, beauty, desire, and satisfaction. The wife of youth is not a merely defensive alternative but the proper object of continuing delight. The conclusion returns to paths and hidden observation. What may be concealed from other people remains before the LORD, and the wrongdoer's own sins become the cords that bind the freedom he expected to find.
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An Ant, a Liar, and a Fire Held Close
Chapter 6 gathers several avoidable traps under one roof. A careless financial pledge can bind a person with his own words. Laziness can turn a series of harmless-sounding delays into sudden want. A schemer can coordinate eyes, fingers, feet, mouth, and heart around the work of division. The LORD's hatred of pride, lies, innocent bloodshed, plotting, and discord shows that social damage is not a minor concern. The chapter then returns to sexual betrayal, where remembered parental teaching becomes a lamp that exposes danger before contact. Fire and hot coals make the point without delicacy: some forms of intimacy cannot be made harmless by confidence. The final comparison with a hungry thief shows why adultery cannot be reduced to a price. Property may answer some losses, but wounded trust and jealousy do not submit neatly to compensation.
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The Invitation Leaves Out the Destination
Chapter 7 slows down to watch one seduction almost frame by frame. The father first asks the son to make wisdom as close as family, then looks from a window at a young man already walking toward a dangerous corner before any invitation is spoken. The woman's appeal is carefully constructed from touch, flattery, religious language, food, costly linen, perfume, and a timetable based on her husband's absence. Every detail makes the encounter seem singular and manageable. Then the vocabulary changes. The same young man walking toward pleasure is suddenly compared with an ox headed to slaughter and a bird rushing into a snare. Nothing about his movement changed except the perspective. The final warning widens the scene beyond him. Many have gone down this road, including strong men, and the house's hidden destination is death.
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The Voice in the Street Was There Before the World
Wisdom returns in chapter 8 with an invitation as public as the seduction in chapter 7 was private. She speaks at heights, crossroads, gates, and entrances, claims truthful and straight speech, and values instruction beyond silver, gold, and rubies. Her strength is then connected to counsel and just rule rather than to power for its own sake. The chapter expands dramatically as Wisdom describes her place before the familiar world existed and her presence as God ordered heavens, depths, sea, and earth. Creation is marked not only by structure but by delight, including delight in human beings. After that cosmic scale, the ending becomes almost domestic again. A learner waits daily at Wisdom's doors. The movement makes ordinary listening weighty because the voice being heard belongs to the same order by which life and the world are understood.
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Two Tables, One Invitation, Different Company
Chapter 9 completes the long opening instruction by placing two houses and two invitations opposite each other. Wisdom has built, prepared, furnished, and sent servants before she calls the inexperienced to eat. Folly occupies a prominent seat and copies the wording of the invitation, but her appeal depends on secrecy and the supposed sweetness of what is stolen. Between the two meals comes a test of teachability. A wise person can become wiser because correction is admitted, while the scorner turns the same reproof into hatred of the one who gives it. The fear of the LORD remains the beginning of wisdom, showing that the choice of table is also a choice of authority. The last verse finally reveals Folly's hidden company. The dead are already there, so the danger was never an unfortunate side effect added after the meal.
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Short Sayings with Long Consequences
A new heading and a new form appear in chapter 10. Instead of extended speeches, compact sayings place wise and foolish, righteous and wicked, diligent and lazy beside one another in rapid sequence. The subjects vary across family life, money, labor, speech, memory, and hope, but repeated images keep the collection connected. Mouths can conceal violence or become wells of life. Work can meet its proper season or leave another person irritated by an unreliable messenger. Wealth can offer real protection without becoming ultimate security. Names can remain blessed or rot after their owners are gone. The chapter repeatedly asks what conduct produces and what lasts after the immediate moment. Beneath the variety lies the old distinction from the opening chapters: the wise heart still receives commandments, while the fool's mouth keeps making enough noise to resist being taught.
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The Scales, the City, and the Open Hand
Chapter 11 moves wisdom into commerce, civic life, friendship, generosity, and household stability. The first object is a scale, making an honest transaction a matter of the LORD's delight rather than mere business technique. Speech then widens from the neighbor to the city, where mouths can either strengthen communal life or help overthrow it. The chapter repeatedly exposes reversals in ordinary calculations. Cruelty harms its practitioner. Beauty without discretion becomes absurd. Scattering can increase, while excessive withholding can produce poverty. Grain held back may provoke a community even when it is technically owned. The final sayings return to household consequence and living fruit. A person can trouble his own home until the inheritance is only wind, while righteous influence becomes a tree of life whose benefit reaches other people.
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Wisdom Shows Up in the Unfinished Work
Chapter 12 keeps testing appearances against what conduct actually produces. Love of knowledge is measured by willingness to receive reproof, and the stability of a house grows from inward roots before it becomes visible architecture. Public reputation is punctured by the person who honors himself while lacking bread. Righteousness is noticed in treatment of animals as well as in speech, planning, and work. The tongue receives especially vivid contrasts: it can pierce like a sword or bring health, speak truth that lasts or release deceit that quickly exposes itself. Diligence is also measured at the finish, not just the start. A hunter may catch something and still fail to turn effort into provision. The chapter closes by gathering truthful dealing, restrained speech, useful labor, and completed work into the path of life.
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Desire Needs a Direction and a Means
Chapter 13 repeatedly asks whether desire has a direction, a means, and enough patience to become fruitful. A sluggard can genuinely want something and still possess nothing because wanting has not become work. Wealth can be displayed without being held, or hidden beneath an appearance of poverty, making appearances unreliable. Quick gain diminishes while gathered provision increases, yet the chapter refuses to make waiting emotionally easy: deferred hope can make the heart sick. Instruction, faithful messengers, and wise companions all help desire move toward life rather than self-defeat. The sayings also complicate simplistic explanations of poverty by observing that a poor person's field may already contain much food while judgment or justice fails. The closing appetite therefore carries the whole chapter with it. Satisfaction depends on more than intensity of desire; labor, truth, companionship, correction, and social conditions all shape the outcome.
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The Clean Stall and the Troubled Heart
Chapter 14 specializes in misleading surfaces. A household can be built or dismantled from within. An empty stall can look wonderfully clean while producing nothing. Laughter can coexist with sorrow, and a road can feel right all the way toward death. Wealth can gather friends while poverty drives even neighbors away, but the next saying immediately judges contempt for the poor rather than endorsing it. The chapter moves freely between domestic life, speech, planning, labor, government, and inward emotion, testing each by substance rather than appearance. Reverence for the LORD becomes strong confidence and a fountain of life, while true witness can change another person's future. The final sayings put patience, envy, treatment of the poor, national righteousness, and royal service under the same moral measure. Prestige never becomes a substitute for character.
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The Better Meal May Contain No Meat
Chapter 15 gathers many earlier themes and gives them a quieter maturity. Speech is judged not only by truth but by temperature, timing, and whether the heart has studied before answering. Worship is judged alongside the worshiper's way, so religious action cannot detach itself from conduct and cancel it. Hidden sorrow and inward joy receive attention without becoming simplistic moral scores. Two memorable "better" sayings place a small meal with love above abundance joined to trouble or hatred, refusing to confuse purchasing power with a healthy home. Counsel establishes plans, while a word in due season shows that timing belongs to wisdom as much as content. The closing movement returns to reproof. The ear that hears correction finds a place among the wise, and humility appears before honor. The chapter ends where the book's education began: wisdom remains possible only for people who can still be taught.
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Plans Are Made Beneath Another Judgment
Proverbs 16 keeps human planning on the page but removes it from the throne. People devise routes, kings pronounce judgments, merchants weigh goods, speakers shape words, and warriors take cities, yet every one of those activities answers to a standard beyond visible success. The LORD weighs the spirit behind a course that looks clean to its maker and directs steps the planner cannot finally command. Righteousness can make a little better than large revenue, and humility can make lowly company better than proud spoil. Speech becomes one of wisdom’s crafts, pleasant enough to teach without becoming deceptive. A whisper can fracture friendship, while restraint can accomplish a conquest grander than captured walls. The chapter closes where it began: a human hand casts the lot, but control of the result never transfers into that hand.
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The Fool Brings Money but Not a Listening Heart
Proverbs 17 is fascinated by the difference between possessing an advantage and possessing the character to use it. A full house cannot buy quiet, a son can be outdone by a wise servant, and money in a fool’s hand cannot purchase the heart required for wisdom. Judgment can fail by acquitting the wicked or condemning the just, while a concealed gift can bend the process for private advantage. Friendship appears as steady love in adversity, but loyalty is not confused with reckless financial pledging. Speech can cover an offense, repeat it until friends divide, or gain a temporary reputation for wisdom simply by stopping. The chapter’s final joke is also its verdict on appearances: even a fool can look discerning with closed lips. Looking wise and being wise remain two very different accomplishments.
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The First Account Is Not the Whole Hearing
Proverbs 18 makes listening part of wisdom’s moral equipment. The fool prefers displaying his own heart to gaining understanding, answers can arrive before hearing is complete, and the first account in a dispute can sound airtight until another person enters and examines it. Speech is deep water, fruit, snare, wound, and a power with consequences reaching life and death. Wealth may feel like a fortified city, but its wall can rise higher in the owner’s imagination than in reality, while the name of the LORD is pictured as a different refuge altogether. Relationships receive the same concrete treatment. An offended brother can become harder to reach than a barred city, yet one friend may cling closer than kin. The chapter keeps separating what merely feels secure, persuasive, or settled from what has actually survived examination.
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The Poor Person's Words Find No Welcome
Proverbs 19 gives unusual space to the social cost of poverty while refusing to equate poverty with moral failure. The poor person may walk in integrity and still watch relatives, friends, and willing listeners disappear, while wealth attracts attention almost automatically. That makes the image of mercy especially striking: pity toward the poor is described as a loan to the LORD, who assumes the obligation others may see no profit in honoring. Elsewhere patience outranks retaliation, a prudent wife is distinguished from inherited property, and recurring anger is exposed as a problem rescue alone cannot cure. Correction and instruction require discernment because hearers differ and even teaching can lead away from knowledge. The chapter ends where its concerns have pointed all along: assets, confident speech, and social position are unreliable measures of wisdom, truth, or worth.
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The Buyer Praises the Bargain After Leaving
Proverbs 20 tests judgment in the tavern, field, marketplace, courtroom, household, throne room, and inward chambers. Wine can distort perception, cold can become an excuse not to plow, buyers can condemn goods while bargaining and praise them after leaving, and false weights can make dishonesty look like arithmetic. The chapter distrusts self-advertised goodness because reliable conduct is harder to find than confident claims. Counsel must be drawn out, vows must be examined before they are made, and even human movement cannot be fully interpreted from inside the path being walked. Kings are given real responsibility to judge, yet mercy and truth are named as what preserve a throne. The final lamp turns the search inward. Appearances matter less and less as the chapter proceeds, because motives, measures, timing, and faithful action keep revealing what speech alone cannot establish.
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The Horse Is Ready, but the Outcome Is Not Owned
Proverbs 21 begins with a king’s heart in the LORD’s hand and ends with a warhorse whose preparation still cannot own victory. Between those limits, the chapter gives human action plenty to do. Diligence plans, the wise preserve resources, the generous give, the upright direct their way, and judgment is a joy to the just. What fails is the attempt to make ritual, wealth, force, or confidence certify a crooked course. Sacrifice cannot compensate for injustice, a stopped ear at the cry of the poor will eventually need an answer, and a wicked purpose makes even religious offering more offensive. Domestic contention can make a roof corner or wilderness preferable to comfort, while guarded speech can accomplish a quieter victory than physical strength. Readiness remains valuable from beginning to end. What Proverbs denies is ownership of the final result.
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A Good Name Cannot Be Weighed in Silver
Proverbs 22 begins by changing the scale on which value is measured. A good name outranks riches, and rich and poor meet under the same Maker before the chapter describes the very real power debt and wealth can create between them. Early training, generosity, dangerous company, and sloth all show habits forming environments other people must live inside. At verse 17 the rhythm changes as the learner is told to bend ear and heart toward “the words of the wise,” retaining them until truthful speech becomes possible. The collection then opens with the vulnerable poor person whose weakness must not become an invitation to robbery, because the LORD pleads that cause. Angry companions, reckless guarantees, moved landmarks, and skilled labor make security concrete. Honor finally comes through demonstrated diligence rather than exploitation, flattery, or status claimed in advance.
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The Feast Does Not Disclose the Host
Proverbs 23 moves through tables, purses, households, hearts, and finally the unstable body of the drunkard. A ruler’s feast may conceal obligation, a selfish host’s welcome may hide calculation, and riches can sprout wings while their owner is still staring at them. The fatherless likewise appear vulnerable until the chapter names their mighty Redeemer, turning a moved landmark into a matter of advocacy and judgment. Parental instruction asks for more than outward compliance: the father seeks the son’s heart, while both father and mother are pictured rejoicing in wisdom. Truth is something to buy and refuse to sell. Appetite becomes the chapter’s recurring test, whether for food, wealth, sex, or wine. The closing drinker has wounds, numbness, and loss of balance behind him, yet his first waking intention is to seek the source again. The trap speaks for itself.
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The Ruined Field Has a Lesson to Give
Proverbs 24 contrasts what wisdom builds with what destructive hearts study. Houses require understanding, strength grows through knowledge, war still needs counsel, and adversity reveals whether claimed strength can actually stand. The chapter then makes ignorance answerable when people are being drawn toward death: “we knew it not” is not the final defense before the One who weighs hearts. Yet wisdom is also honey, desirable in the present and joined to a future hope. A righteous person may fall repeatedly without being finished, and even an enemy’s fall is not permission for private celebration. Fresh sayings of the wise insist on impartial judgment, truthful testimony, ordered work, and rejection of personal vengeance. The final vineyard gathers the whole chapter into one ruined landscape. Small delays accumulate until thorns, nettles, and a broken wall become visible instruction.
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The Right Word Needs the Right Setting
Proverbs 25 announces itself as a Solomonic collection copied by the men of Hezekiah, then spends the chapter asking what conduct fits its setting. Kings search matters, silver is refined, and honored places are better received by invitation than seized by self-promotion. Words become especially sensitive to placement. A timely sentence can be gold set in silver, a faithful messenger can refresh, a false promise can gather clouds without rain, and singing to a heavy heart can make grief less sheltered rather than more. Even good things have limits: too much honey sickens, and too much visiting exhausts welcome. An enemy is still to receive bread and water, while self-glory and ungoverned spirit expose a different failure of proportion. The final wall-less city makes self-command physical: without it, strength can exist while defense has already collapsed.
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The Door Turns, but It Never Gets Anywhere
Proverbs 26 fills the page with fools, sluggards, meddlers, gossipers, flatterers, and people whose explanations are more impressive than their judgment. Its two famous commands about answering a fool sit side by side because each protects against a different danger: becoming like folly or allowing folly to congratulate itself. Possessing a proverb does not guarantee the wisdom to use it, just as sending a fool with a message can cripple the sender’s own purpose. The sluggard then turns like a door on hinges, accomplishing movement without travel and defending it with extraordinary confidence in his own wisdom. Quarrels become dogs grabbed by the ears and fires fed by gossip. Deception called a joke still throws real weapons. By the end, polished speech resembles silver over broken pottery, attractive enough to hide hatred until the surface finally fails.
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The Nearby Friend and the Well-Kept Flock
Proverbs 27 is a chapter of limits that pride and appetite would rather ignore. Tomorrow remains unknown, self-praise lacks an independent witness, hunger can make bitterness sweet, and fullness can make honey unwanted. Friendship is tested by whether correction is faithful, not merely pleasant, and a nearby neighbor can matter more in crisis than distant kin. Even a blessing can become socially disastrous when shouted at dawn. Iron sharpening iron, a tended fig tree, praise acting like a furnace, and a fool in a mortar all ask what contact actually produces in character. The closing movement turns to flocks, grass, clothing, exchange, milk, and household provision. Riches and crowns do not maintain themselves forever. The practical answer to an unknown tomorrow is not boasting about it, but careful attention to the living resources that sustain actual people today.
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The Poor Can See Through the Rich Person's Confidence
Proverbs 28 repeatedly separates wealth from wisdom and poverty from guilt. A poor person can walk uprightly, another poor person can oppress the poor, and a rich man convinced of his own wisdom can be searched out by someone with little money and real understanding. Unjust gain, partiality, haste for riches, and family theft are all exposed by what they do rather than by the labels their actors prefer. The chapter also pays close attention to concealment. People hide when wicked power rises, sinners try to cover wrongdoing, and some hide their eyes from the poor so they will not have to see the need. Confession joined with forsaking opens a different possibility, mercy. Public and private life therefore mirror each other. Wickedness creates hiding places, while righteous flourishing, truthful acknowledgment, generosity, and wise walking bring people and deeds back into the open.
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A Ruler Who Listens to Lies Changes the Room
Proverbs 29 shows how character spreads through households, courts, cities, and systems of speech. Repeated reproof can meet a neck that keeps hardening until consequence arrives suddenly, while rulers can make whole populations rejoice or mourn through the quality of judgment. The poor person’s cause becomes a test of righteous authority because justice is most revealing when the claimant has little leverage. A ruler who listens to lies teaches an entire service what kind of speech gets rewarded. The chapter also corrects familiar misreadings: “vision” concerns prophetic revelation and the law, not organizational ambition. Hasty speech, uncontrolled anger, pride, indulgent formation, and fear of people all place judgment under pressure. The closing sayings finally strip human approval of ultimate authority. Rulers may grant favors and audiences may love or hate, but every person’s judgment comes from the LORD.
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The Teacher Who Begins by Admitting His Limits
Agur opens Proverbs 30 by doing the opposite of advertising his authority: he admits how little he can command or fully understand, then sets that limitation beside the purity of God's words. His prayer for neither poverty nor riches makes “enough” a chosen boundary rather than a consolation prize. From there the chapter keeps testing appetite and proportion. Some things never say they have enough; hidden wrongdoing can wipe its mouth and deny that anything happened; social reversals can expose instability; and small creatures answer weakness with preparation, shelter, coordination, or access. The numbered sayings do not force unlike things into moral equivalence. They notice patterns across them. By the end, mystery gives way to plain cause and effect. Milk churned becomes butter, a wrung nose bleeds, and anger under continued pressure becomes strife. The chapter begins with what Agur cannot master and closes with a consequence simple enough to feel in the hand.
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Her Works Receive the Final Word
Proverbs 31 begins with a king listening to his mother before it shows him exercising authority. Lemuel is warned that appetite can consume the strength required for judgment, and that impaired judgment becomes injury for afflicted people. His mouth is therefore given a public duty: speak for those whose own position cannot secure a hearing. The chapter then turns to an alphabetically ordered portrait of a woman defined first by strength, capacity, and trust. Her work crosses household management, manual skill, commerce, land purchase, preparation, generosity, speech, and care. The poem does not present these activities as a single day's timetable, nor does it make assistance invisible. Her hands produce, trade, prepare, and open to the needy; her mouth carries wisdom and kindness. Beauty and favor are finally denied the last word. The fear of the LORD supplies the measure, and the gates become the place where her own works receive public praise.
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