Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Proverbs · About this commentary
A Wise Son and the Mouth of the Righteous
Proverbs 10:1-16
1 The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son makes a glad father; but a foolish son brings grief to his mother. · WEB
The style changes completely at this verse, and the first thing the new collection does is put a father and a mother back in the room.
A new heading marks the change — The proverbs of Solomon — and with it the writing changes shape. The long discourses stop. What follows for twelve chapters is single verses, each complete in itself, most of them built on a contrast with but in the middle. There is no argument running through them and very little arrangement by subject.
That form is worth understanding before reading further. A proverb of this kind states one true thing about how life generally runs, in the fewest words that will hold it. It does not qualify itself, because a qualified proverb is not memorable and memorability is the whole point. Each is a tool to be picked up when it fits, and the collection expects the reader to supply the judgment about when that is.
The first verse of the collection is chosen with care. A wise son makes a glad father; but a foolish son brings grief to his mother. Nine chapters of a father instructing a son end, and the first independent saying is about what a son does to his parents. The instruction has not changed subject; it has changed method.
The run that follows moves through wealth, work and speech, and two of its lines temper the rest. Treasures of wickedness profit nothing, but righteousness delivers from death sets a limit on what money can do, and it is followed within a few verses by a plain acknowledgment of what money does do: The rich man's wealth is his strong city. The destruction of the poor is their poverty. No moral is attached to that second saying. It is an observation that being poor is dangerous, and the book is content to state it without comment.
Speech dominates the second half of the run, and one verse from it has outlived the rest. Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all wrongs. Covering here is not concealment of a crime — the same collection insists that a hidden fault is found out. It is the refusal to publish an injury that could be published, and the New Testament takes the phrase up in exactly that sense 1 Peter 4:8.
settled What this mark means