Biblion Bible Commentary
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He Who Has Pity on the Poor Lends to Yahweh
Proverbs 19:16-29
16 He who keeps the commandment keeps his soul, but he who is contemptuous in his ways shall die. · WEB
Kindness to a poor man is described as a loan with a guarantor, and discipline is urged while there is still hope.
The run's best-known verse turns charity into a transaction and then names the counterparty: He who has pity on the poor lends to Yahweh; he will reward him. Two things about the metaphor matter. A loan is not a gift, and the language assumes repayment. And the borrower is not the poor man, who could not repay, but God, who can. What looks like money going out of a household without return is described as money placed with the most reliable debtor there is.
Discipline follows immediately and the phrasing is careful: Discipline your son, for there is hope; don't be a willing party to his death. The reason given is not that he deserves it but that there is still time. Correction is presented as an act performed inside a window, and the second clause names the alternative in the strongest terms the collection has — not sternness against indulgence, but action against consent to a boy's ruin.
Two verses about anger sit together and the second is unusually shrewd. A hot-tempered man must pay the penalty, for if you rescue him, you must do it again. The angry man's temper produces consequences. A friend who keeps absorbing them is not helping but subscribing. That is a proverb about rescue rather than about rage, and it is one of the few places in Scripture that addresses the person standing beside the problem.
The recurring domestic complaint appears here in its most memorable form: a wife's quarrels are a continual dripping. It is not violence or betrayal but repetition. It is the sound that cannot be ignored and cannot be endured. And its counterpart in the same chapter distinguishes what can be arranged from what cannot: House and riches are an inheritance from fathers, but a prudent wife is from Yahweh. Property can be left to a son. Judgment in the person he marries is placed outside the family's power to provide.
The run closes on the sluggard in the collection's funniest verse: The sluggard buries his hand in the dish; he will not so much as bring it to his mouth again. He has already reached the food. The remaining distance is a few inches, and it defeats him.
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