Biblion Bible Commentary
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Righteousness Exalts a Nation
Proverbs 14:18-35
18 The simple inherit folly, but the prudent are crowned with knowledge. · WEB
The run says plainly that poor men lose their friends, and then says that how they are treated is a verdict on God's honor.
Two verses stand side by side and are usually quoted apart. The first is an observation with no comment attached: The poor person is shunned even by his own neighbor, but the rich person has many friends. The book is not approving of this. It is stating what happens, as it stated earlier that poverty is the destruction of the poor Proverbs 10:15. Its realism about money is part of what makes its counsel usable.
The second supplies the judgment: He who despises his neighbor sins, but he who has pity on the poor is blessed. A few verses later the ground of that is given in the strongest terms the collection uses about the poor: He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for his Maker, but he who is kind to the needy honors him. Treatment of a poor man is treated as treatment of the God who made him. A transaction between two people is a statement about a third.
Anger is the run's other main subject and it is handled with unusual precision. He who is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a quick temper displays folly. Slowness is credited to understanding rather than to temperament, which makes it a competence rather than a disposition. And the physical claim that follows is remarkable for its date: The life of the body is a heart at peace, but envy rots the bones. An interior state is said to have bodily consequences. The collection asserts it twice.
The verse that has traveled furthest is Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a disgrace to any people. Two things in it are worth marking. It moves from individual conduct to national standing, which this collection rarely does. And the second half is deliberately universal: any people, not Israel alone. The claim is that the moral order the book has been describing applies to nations that never heard of it.
One saying in the middle is easily passed over and is the sharpest thing in the run: In all hard work there is profit, but the talk of the lips leads only to poverty. Talking about work is set against doing it. The collection knows which one produces the feeling of having accomplished something.
settled What this mark means