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📜 Table of Contents › Proverbs

📖 Proverbs

Chapters

2 of 31 chapters translated · 6.5%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

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Chapter by chapter

Proverbs 1The prologue to wisdom — the book's whole toolkit in seven verses, 'the fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge,' a father's warning against the gang, and Lady Wisdom crying aloud in the streets.Proverbs 31⚠ Chayil is a FORCE word — what an army is called, what valour is, what wealth and capability are — and eshet chayil (v10) is a WOMAN OF VALOUR, not a character reference. The shelf splits five ways on that one word: KJV 'virtuous', ASV 'worthy', NWT 'capable', TNM 'competente' — and only RV 1909 keeps the force, with 'Mujer fuerte'. The register is not an accident: her husband lacks no SHALAL, plunder (v11), she girds her loins (v17), and she gives PREY to her household (v15). ⚠ The word even turns around inside the chapter — v3, in the separate oracle a queen mother teaches King Lemuel, warns him not to give his CHAYIL to women. Read as a list of activities, vv13-24 describe a business: importing like a merchant fleet, buying and developing land out of her own profits, checking her margin, and selling wholesale to a Canaanite shipper. She laughs at the last day (v25). And the shape matters: vv10-31 are a COMPLETE acrostic, alef to tav with no irregularity at all, which reads far more naturally as praise built to be memorable than as a list of requirements — and only the NWT and TNM tell the reader it is there.

About the book

A full introduction to Proverbs — author, date, structure, themes and the honest questions of authorship — is still to be written for this book.