Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Proverbs · About this commentary
The Fruit of the Righteous Is a Tree of Life
Proverbs 11:16-31
16 A gracious woman obtains honor, but violent men obtain riches. · WEB
A cluster on generosity produces the collection's most counter-intuitive line: the man who scatters ends up with more.
Six verses in this run form a genuine cluster on giving, which is rare in a collection this loosely arranged. It opens with a paradox stated flatly: There is one who scatters, and increases yet more. There is one who withholds more than is appropriate, but gains poverty. Scattering is what a sower does. The word is chosen because sowing looks exactly like waste to anyone who does not know what it is for.
The next verse gives the same thought as a physical image: The liberal soul shall be made fat. He who waters shall be watered also himself. A man who irrigates somebody else's field finds his own watered. This is not presented as a transaction with God, and no promise of return is attached to the giving as a motive. It is an observation about how generosity actually behaves in a community over time.
The grain merchant follows and makes it concrete. People curse someone who withholds grain, but blessing will be on the head of him who sells it. Holding grain back in a shortage to raise the price was ordinary commercial sense. The book calls it the thing a town curses a man for. It does not argue the economics. It states what the neighbors will say.
Around that cluster sit sayings on the same theme from other angles. The merciful man does good to his own soul, but he who is cruel troubles his own flesh — cruelty described as self-injury. He who trusts in his riches will fall. And the picture of misplaced value that everyone remembers: Like a gold ring in a pig's snout, is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion. The ring is real gold and the pig is genuinely a pig, and the saying is about the mismatch rather than about either.
The run ends on an image already used of wisdom herself Proverbs 3:18: The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life. What a righteous life produces is described as feeding other people, which is where the generosity cluster has been heading all along. And the last clause turns outward — He who is wise wins souls — the only place in the collection where wisdom is credited with gaining anyone besides its owner.
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