Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Proverbs · About this commentary
A Word Fitly Spoken
Proverbs 25:15-28
15 By patience a ruler is persuaded. A soft tongue breaks the bone. · WEB
The run is built almost entirely of comparisons, and the strangest of them tells a man to feed his enemy.
This section works by likeness rather than by contrast, and the images are drawn from ordinary discomfort. Trusting an unfaithful man in a crisis is like a bad tooth or a lame foot. Not a catastrophe, but a thing that fails precisely when weight is put on it. Singing cheerful songs to a person in grief is as one who takes away a garment in cold weather. That is exactly what well-meant encouragement feels like from inside sorrow.
The opening verse contains a small paradox worth pausing on: By patience a ruler is persuaded. A soft tongue breaks the bone. Softness is credited with the effect of force. The collection has said something similar about a gentle answer Proverbs 15:1, and here it goes further. Persistence without hardness is described as capable of breaking what direct pressure cannot.
Two sayings concern knowing when to stop. Have you found honey? Eat as much as is sufficient for you, lest you eat too much, and vomit it. And the domestic version: Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor's house, lest he be weary of you, and hate you. Both are about good things ruined by quantity, and the second is the sharper because the good thing is friendship.
The famous instruction sits in the middle: If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat. If he is thirsty, give him water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on his head, and Yahweh will reward you. Paul quotes it in full and adds his own conclusion, which is to overcome evil with good Romans 12:20–21. The image of coals is difficult. What the passage plainly does not permit is feeding an enemy as a method of injuring him, since it stands among sayings that forbid rejoicing at his fall Proverbs 24:17.
The closing verse is the collection's definition of a man without self-control, and it is architectural: Like a city that is broken down and without walls is a man whose spirit is without restraint. An unwalled city is not a free city. It is a place anything can enter and nothing can be kept in. That is the book's whole account of what a lack of restraint actually does to a person.
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