Biblion Bible Commentary
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A False Balance Is an Abomination
Proverbs 11:1-15
1 A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight. · WEB
The collection opens its second chapter with a shop scale, and the word it uses for God's reaction to a rigged one is the word reserved for idolatry.
A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight. Two things about that sentence are deliberate. The first is the vocabulary. Abomination is the term the law uses for idols and for the practices of the nations, and delight is its opposite. A merchant's scales are being placed in the highest and lowest categories the language has.
The second is the setting. Weighing was how almost every transaction worked, since coinage was not yet standard, and a stone that was slightly light in one pan cheated every customer by a fraction too small to notice. It is a crime with no visible victim, committed dozens of times a day, and the book puts it first in the chapter and returns to it repeatedly Proverbs 20:10 Proverbs 20:23.
What follows moves from the scale to the man, and the run is unusually well ordered for this collection. Pride brings shame; humility brings wisdom. Integrity guides the upright; perversity destroys the treacherous. And then the theme that dominates the middle: Riches don't profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. That is the same pairing as the false balance, one verse abstracted — what money buys, measured against a day when it buys nothing.
Three verses turn from the individual to the town, and they are among the few places where this collection thinks about a community as a whole. When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices... By the blessing of the upright, the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked. A city's fortunes are tied to the character of the people in it, and the instrument of its overthrow is named as speech rather than as violence.
The run closes with two sayings about what a man does with other people's business. One who brings gossip betrays a confidence, and the trustworthy man keeps a secret. And the guarantor reappears: He who is collateral for a stranger will suffer for it. Both are about holding something that belongs to somebody else — a confidence, a debt — and both say that the careless holder pays.
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