Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Wise Woman Builds Her House
Proverbs 14:1-17
1 Every wise woman builds her house, but the foolish one tears it down with her own hands. · WEB
A run about self-knowledge contains the verse the book is most often quoted for, and a joke about oxen.
It opens with a builder. Every wise woman builds her house, but the foolish one tears it down with her own hands. The phrase about hands is what makes it. Nothing external ruins this house; the demolition is domestic, deliberate and performed by the person who lives there. The image returns at the end of the book in the woman of chapter 31, whose whole portrait is of building.
The fourth verse is the collection's driest joke and it is genuinely useful. Where no oxen are, the crib is clean, but much increase is by the strength of the ox. A stable with no animals in it needs no mucking out. It also produces nothing. Anyone who has chosen tidiness over productivity, or the absence of complication over the presence of life, is being quietly described.
The run then turns inward, and three verses in a row concern the limits of what anyone can see. The heart knows its own bitterness and joy; he will not share these with a stranger — a plain acknowledgment that the deepest part of a person is not accessible to observers, in a book otherwise confident about reading character from conduct. Then: Even in laughter the heart may be sorrowful, and mirth may end in heaviness. A cheerful man may be nothing of the kind, and the collection says so without suggesting he is a hypocrite.
Between them stands the verse that has outlived the chapter: There is a way which seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death. It is stated twice in the book Proverbs 16:25, and its force depends on the word seems. The man is not lying and is not being deceived by anyone else. His judgment is functioning normally and is wrong, which is the strongest argument the book makes for needing counsel from outside himself.
The practical conclusion follows a verse later. A simple man believes everything, but the prudent man carefully considers his ways. Credulity is treated as a moral condition rather than an innocent one, and the remedy is not suspicion of other people. It is examination of his own road.
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