A False Balance Is an Abomination
1 A false balance is an abomination to Yahweh, but accurate weights are his delight. 2 When pride comes, then comes shame, but with humility comes wisdom. 3 The integrity of the upright shall guide them, but the perverseness of the treacherous shall destroy them. 4 Riches don’t profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death. 5 The righteousness of the blameless will direct his way, but the wicked shall fall by his own wickedness. 6 The righteousness of the upright shall deliver them, but the unfaithful will be trapped by evil desires. 7 When a wicked man dies, hope perishes, and expectation of power comes to nothing. 8 A righteous person is delivered out of trouble, and the wicked takes his place. 9 With his mouth the godless man destroys his neighbor, but the righteous will be delivered through knowledge. 10 When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices. When the wicked perish, there is shouting. 11 By the blessing of the upright, the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked. 12 One who despises his neighbor is void of wisdom, but a man of understanding holds his peace. 13 One who brings gossip betrays a confidence, but one who is of a trustworthy spirit is one who keeps a secret. 14 Where there is no wise guidance, the nation falls, but in the multitude of counselors there is victory. 15 He who is collateral for a stranger will suffer for it, but he who refuses pledges of collateral is secure.
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.
settled What this mark means