The Door Turns, but It Never Gets Anywhere

Every verse from 1 to 12 except the second names the fool, so the passage is sometimes called the book of fools. Rain at harvest was not only odd but ruinous: Samuel called down thunder and rain at wheat harvest in 1 Samuel 12:17–18 as a sign of the LORD’s displeasure. Honour on a fool is weather in the wrong month.

The “swallow” is deror, a swift or swallow, whose name also means liberty, as in “proclaim liberty” (Leviticus 25:10). The written Hebrew says the causeless curse “shall not come”; the traditional reading says it “shall come to him”, perhaps back to the one who spoke it. Balaam put it plainly: “How shall I curse, whom God hath not cursed?” (Numbers 23:8).

Horse, donkey and fool are listed in one line, each with the tool it needs. Psalm 32:9 draws the same comparison: “Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and bridle.” The fool is ranked with animals that can only be steered from outside.

“According to his folly” means on his level, in his terms. “Lest thou also be like unto him”: the danger is of becoming equal to him, of being dragged down into his kind of argument. The word “also” puts the wise man alongside the fool, the very place he should not be.

The Talmud (Shabbat 30b) records that the sages once considered withdrawing Proverbs from use because verses 4 and 5 contradict each other. They resolved it by assigning the two sayings to different kinds of matters. “Wise in his own conceit”, literally in his own eyes, returns in verses 12 and 16.

“Damage” is hamas, violence, the word for the violence that filled the earth before the flood (Genesis 6:11). The sender “drinketh” it, swallows it down. Cutting off the feet may be the sender’s own feet, since his messenger was meant to be his legs, or it may describe a messenger who might as well have none.

The word for “parable” is mashal, which is also the Hebrew name of this book: Proverbs is Mishlei, “proverbs of”. The book points at itself: a proverb can be quoted by a fool and still do nothing. The lame man’s legs “hang” uselessly, and so does a saying in a mouth that does not understand it.

A “sling” is named here with a word found nowhere else. A stone tied into a sling cannot be thrown; it either stays or swings back at the slinger. The King James margin gives a different picture: “as he that putteth a precious stone in an heap of stones”, a gem wasted on a pile of rubble. Either way, honour is thrown away.

The second half is identical to the second half of verse 7, and the two lines frame verse 8. The picture may be a drunk who does not feel the thorn in his hand, or a drunk waving a thornbush about and hurting everyone near him. Either way the proverb becomes a weapon in the wrong hands.

Almost every word here is ambiguous. The word read as “great” can also mean archer, as in Jeremiah 50:29, “call together the archers”. Many modern translations take it so: “Like an archer who wounds everyone is he who hires a passing fool or drunkard.” The King James, reading the same word as “great God”, arrives at a very different sentence.

Dogs in Israel were scavengers, not pets; they ate Jezebel in 2 Kings 9:36. “Returneth” is shuv, the Bible’s word for repenting, turning back, used here for turning back to the wrong thing. The second half says the fool “repeats” his folly, the verb of 17:9. Second Peter 2:22 quotes the first half.

“Seest thou” is the same opening as 22:29, inviting the reader to look around. The verse is repeated at 29:20 with a different subject, the man “hasty in his words”. After twelve verses about fools, the book names someone in a worse state: the fool can still be taught; the self-certain man has closed the door.

A near repeat of 22:13, but now with two different words for lion, shahal and ari, one of them poetic. The “way” is the road outside town and the “streets” are the open squares inside it. The sluggard has lions both outside and in, so there is nowhere left to go.

Ancient doors did not turn on hinges but on a pivot: a post set in a stone socket at the bottom and a hole in the lintel above. Such socket stones have been dug up at many sites. The door moves all day and never leaves its socket; the sluggard turns over in bed and never leaves the bed.

This is 19:24 again, with the ending changed. “It grieveth him” is nil’ah, he is too tired, the verb used of the men of Sodom who “wearied themselves to find the door” in Genesis 19:11. The effort that exhausts this man is lifting food from the dish to his own mouth.

“Render a reason” is literally “return taste”, ta‘am, judgment or good sense, the word David uses when he blesses Abigail’s “advice” in 1 Samuel 25:33. Seven is a full council; the Persian king had seven counsellors (Ezra 7:14). The sluggard thinks himself wiser than a whole royal cabinet.

“Meddleth” is the verb for getting worked up, becoming furious, the one used in 20:2 of provoking a king. The passerby gets angry over a fight that is not his. Street dogs were half wild; once you have one by the ears you cannot let go without being bitten, and you cannot keep holding on.

“A mad man” renders a word found only here, perhaps someone playing the madman. “Firebrands” are burning arrows, and “arrows, and death” may mean deadly arrows. Psalm 7:13 describes God preparing “instruments of death” and arrows against the persecutor. This man is firing blindly into a crowd.

“Am not I in sport?” uses the verb tsahaq, to laugh or joke, the root of Isaac’s name. It is also the word for how Lot’s sons-in-law heard his warning of Sodom’s destruction: “he seemed as one that mocked” (Genesis 19:14). The joke is the deceiver’s alibi; the damage is real either way.

“Ceaseth” is the verb for becoming quiet or still, the one used of the sea in Jonah 1:11, “that the sea may be calm unto us”. Take away the wood and the fire dies; take away the whisperer and the storm goes calm. The talebearer is the fuel, not merely a spectator.

Two kinds of coal: pehamim, black charcoal, and gehalim, glowing embers. Adding charcoal to embers is how a fire was kept going in a brazier. The contentious man is the charcoal, feeding what is already hot. “Kindle” renders a rare verb meaning to heat up.

This repeats 18:8 word for word, but its setting changes its force. Here it sits between the fire of verses 20–21 and the disguise of verses 23–26, so the gossip’s words become both fuel for the quarrel and the concealed thing that goes down deep inside, where verse 24 says the hater stores his deceit.

“Burning lips” are fervent ones, warm protestations of friendship. The Greek reads “smooth lips”, a one-letter difference in Hebrew. “Silver dross” may be a single word for glaze, known from the related Ugaritic language; many translations read “like glaze on an earthen vessel”. A cheap clay pot is made to shine.

“Dissembleth” means to make oneself unrecognisable, to wear a disguise. The verse locates the two halves of the man: the disguise is on his lips, and the deceit is stored “within him”, in his inward parts, like goods set by in a storeroom. The next two verses explain why this matters.

Joab is the Bible’s portrait of this: he took Amasa by the beard to kiss him, asking “Art thou in health, my brother?”, and stabbed him with the other hand (2 Samuel 20:9–10). “Seven abominations” recalls the seven things the LORD hates in 6:16–19, all of them lodged in one heart.

“Deceit” renders a word found only here. The “congregation” is qahal, the assembly of the people, where cases were judged in public; the young man of 5:14 nearly comes to ruin “in the midst of the congregation and assembly”. What was hidden in one man’s heart is exposed before everyone.

Psalm 7:15 has the same image: “He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made.” Ecclesiastes 10:8 repeats it. The Book of Esther shows it done: Haman is hanged on the gallows he built for Mordecai (Esther 7:10). A stone rolled uphill comes back down on the one pushing it.

The Hebrew says a lying tongue hates “its crushed ones”, those it has already hurt. The liar comes to hate his victims. The Roman historian Tacitus made the same observation: it is human nature to hate those you have injured. “Worketh ruin” renders a rare word for overthrow, making someone stumble.