Biblion Bible Commentary
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The King's Heart Is in Yahweh's Hand
Proverbs 21:1-16
1 The king’s heart is in Yahweh’s hand like the watercourses. He turns it wherever he desires. · WEB
The most powerful man in the country is compared to an irrigation channel, and doing justice is ranked above bringing a sacrifice.
The king's heart is in Yahweh's hand like the watercourses. He turns it wherever he desires. The comparison is to irrigation. A farmer opens a channel with his foot and the water goes where the channel goes, without resistance and without knowing it has been directed. Applied to a king it is the strongest statement of providence in the collection, and it is aimed at the one man in the country who appears to be unconstrained.
The verse after it puts the same point to everybody else: Every way of a man is right in his own eyes, but Yahweh weighs the hearts. The collection has said this twice already Proverbs 16:2, and its repetition beside the king is deliberate. Both the powerful and the ordinary are described as sincerely confident and independently assessed.
Then a ranking that would have been startling in a temple state: To do righteousness and justice is more acceptable to Yahweh than sacrifice. Sacrifice was the appointed system, commanded in the law, and the book does not abolish it. What it does is put fair dealing above it in the order of acceptability, which the prophets said in their own way and Samuel had said to a king 1 Samuel 15:22.
The run's most uncomfortable verse concerns hearing. Whoever stops his ears at the cry of the poor, he will also cry out, but shall not be heard. The punishment is described in the exact shape of the offense — a man who declined to hear is not heard — and no further explanation is offered.
One verse is unusually clear-eyed about how influence works. A gift in secret pacifies anger, and a bribe in the cloak, strong wrath. It is a plain statement that bribery is effective, made without approval and set among verses that condemn it. The collection consistently refuses to pretend that dishonest methods fail. It says they work, and then it says what they are.
settled What this mark means