The Ruined Field Has a Lesson to Give

The warning against envying sinners comes three times in a short span (23:17, here, and verse 19). This time the second line names what pulls: not their money but their company, “neither desire to be with them”. The verb is a craving, the appetite word of 21:10, now fixed on belonging to the group.

The reason not to envy them is to listen to them. Heart and lips are both busy, the heart planning violence and the lips talking about trouble. It is the same talk as the gang’s invitation in 1:11, “Come with us, let us lay wait for blood”, overheard at a later stage.

Wisdom, understanding and knowledge in verses 3 and 4 are the same three tools with which the LORD made the world in 3:19–20: “by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath he established the heavens. By his knowledge the depths are broken up.” A household is built with the tools of creation.

The gang in 1:13 promised, “We shall find all precious substance, we shall fill our houses with spoil.” This verse uses the same verb and the same “precious” wealth, but the rooms are filled “by knowledge”. Two households full of riches: one by plunder, one by wisdom.

The Hebrew reads “a wise man is in strength”, which is compact to the point of puzzling. The Greek Septuagint reads “a wise man is better than a strong one”, which fits 21:22, where a wise man scales the city of the mighty. The second line says knowledge “increaseth strength”, making power grow rather than replacing it.

“Safety” is teshu‘ah, victory, the same word as 21:31, “safety is of the LORD”. One verse says victory is the LORD’s, the other that victory lies in many counsellors. The book holds both: the LORD gives the outcome, and he gives it through advisers who have done their thinking.

“Too high” is spelled like ra’mot, the word for corals, a luxury in Job 28:18, so the line may play on both: wisdom is out of reach and out of the fool’s price range. At the gate, where the town’s elders met to decide cases, he has nothing to say. The fool in this verse is silent where it matters most.

“Mischievous person” is literally a master of schemes. The word for scheme, mezimmah, was a virtue in 1:4, where the book offers the young man “discretion”. The same faculty for planning can be turned either way. A man who plans evil gets a name for it, and the name sticks.

“Thought” here is zimmah, the scheme or plan. The folly is sinful already at the planning stage, before any act. The second line is unusual: the scorner is an abomination “to men”, not to the LORD as the phrase usually runs. People themselves cannot stand him.

The Hebrew is a pun on one root. The “day of adversity” is the day of tsarah, narrowness, and the strength is tsar, narrow, small. A tight day shows up a thin strength. “Faint” means to go slack, to let the hands drop.

The King James reads the verse as a condition, “if thou forbear”. Many modern translations read it as two commands: “Deliver them that are drawn unto death, and hold back those that are staggering to the slaughter.” “Ready to be slain” describes people tottering, stumbling toward the killing.

“Behold, we knew it not” is a plural excuse, a group sheltering in shared ignorance. The answer calls God “he that keepeth thy soul”: the one who has been guarding your life asks why you did not guard theirs. The last question, rendering to every man according to his works, is quoted from Psalm 62:12 in Romans 2:6.

The “honeycomb” is nofet, honey dripping from the comb, the same word used for the lips of the strange woman that “drop as an honeycomb” in 5:3. There the sweetness was a lure. Here the father tells his son to eat honey because it really is good, and Psalm 19:10 calls God’s judgments “sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb”.

The first word is an imperative, “know”: know that wisdom is like this for your soul. “When thou hast found it” recalls 3:13, “Happy is the man that findeth wisdom”. The promise at the end repeats 23:18 almost word for word, and the “reward” is literally an aftermath, a future that is actually there.

The book addresses the wicked man directly, “O wicked man”, a rare move in Proverbs. His target is the righteous man’s “resting place”, the word for the place where a flock lies down, as in Psalm 23:2, “He maketh me to lie down”. The righteous man’s home is pictured as a sheepfold being stalked.

Two different verbs for falling. The just man “falleth” and gets up; the wicked “stumble” into calamity and do not. Micah 7:8 says the same in the first person: “Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise.” That verse also leads straight into the warning of verse 17.

Job lists this among the sins he never committed: “If I rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him” (Job 31:29). The verse pairs outward rejoicing with the heart’s private gladness, so even silent pleasure at an enemy’s trip is forbidden.

“It displease him” is literally “it be evil in his eyes”, the idiom used when “the thing that David had done displeased the LORD” (2 Samuel 11:27). The logic is startling: gloating could end the enemy’s punishment. The verse does not say the wrath will turn onto the gloater, but the thought is not far off.

Almost the opening line of Psalm 37: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.” “Fret” means to heat oneself up, to burn inwardly. The warning against envy of the wicked is now given for the third time in two chapters.

“No reward” is literally “no aftermath”: the word promised to the son in verse 14 is denied to the evil man. He has no future. The lamp of the wicked goes out, as in 13:9. The contrast is precise: one expectation is not cut off, the other flame is extinguished.

First Peter 2:17 sounds like an echo: “Fear God. Honour the king.” The word behind “them that are given to change” could also be read “both of them”, and the Greek takes it that way: do not disobey either of them, the LORD or the king. That reading ties the line to “them both” in verse 22.

“Them both” is most likely the LORD and the king, and the ruin is the destruction either can bring. Who can know what that looks like until it arrives? The Greek Septuagint adds five extra verses here about the king’s power and the tongue, not found in the Hebrew.

“Respect of persons” is literally to recognize faces, to see who someone is and rule accordingly. Deuteronomy 1:17 uses the same phrase: “Ye shall not respect persons in judgment; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great.” A judge was to be blind to faces and hear only the case.

“Curse” is a strong verb for denouncing or pronouncing against, used in Leviticus 24:11 of blasphemy. The people curse him, and then “nations” abhor him: the judge who acquits the guilty becomes infamous beyond his own town. The first line is a direct quotation of the corrupt verdict itself.

“Rebuke” here means to convict, to prove someone in the wrong. “Delight” is literally that it goes pleasantly for them, from the root of na‘im, pleasant. The judges who call wickedness what it is are promised a good blessing, the reverse of the curse in verse 24.

A “right answer” is literally straight words, from nakhoah, the word for what lies directly ahead, as in 4:25, “let thine eyes look right on.” The kiss on the lips was a sign of close friendship. An honest reply is treated as an act of affection, not an act of hostility.

In Hebrew “build thine house” can mean founding a household, marrying and raising a family. Deuteronomy 20:5–7 lists the same order of life: a man who has built a house, planted a vineyard, betrothed a wife. Get the field in working order first, so there is something to feed the house with.

“Without cause” is hinnam, for nothing, gratuitously, the word Satan uses in Job 1:9, “Doth Job fear God for nought?” The false witness here may have no gain at all in view; he testifies against his neighbour for no reason but ill will. The second line asks whether he would deceive with his lips.

“As he hath done to me” is what Samson says after burning the Philistines’ fields: “As they did unto me, so have I done unto them” (Judges 15:11). The law of eye for eye in Exodus 21:24 was for judges to administer, not for injured men to carry out on their own account.

A rare first-person report, like the watcher at the window in 7:6. The speaker walks past a neighbour’s property, not his own. Isaiah 5:5–6 has God threaten his own vineyard with the same fate: break down the wall, and “there shall come up briers and thorns”. The owner is called “void of understanding”, lacking heart.

“Thorns” and “nettles” are two kinds of weed; the second is a rare word for some coarse plant that takes over neglected ground. The “stone wall” was a dry-stone wall that kept out wild boar and foxes, the animals that ravage vines in Psalm 80:13 and Song of Solomon 2:15. With the wall down, the vineyard is open to all of them.

Two verbs of seeing, one for looking and one for gazing. “Considered it well” is literally “I set my heart”. “Received instruction” is “I took discipline”, the very thing the book asks the son to do, and here the teacher takes it himself, from somebody else’s ruin.

This verse repeats 6:10 word for word. It sounds like the sluggard’s own murmur, just a little more, quoted back at him. “Folding of the hands” is the clasp of the arms at rest; Ecclesiastes 4:5 says “the fool foldeth his hands together, and eateth his own flesh”.

Almost the same as 6:11, with a small change of form in the word for “one that travelleth”. The picture is of a vagrant or highwayman who arrives unannounced. “An armed man” is literally a man with a shield. Poverty comes walking in, and want arrives ready for battle.