Biblion Bible Commentary
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As a Dog Returns to His Vomit
Proverbs 26:1-16
1 Like snow in summer, and as rain in harvest, so honor is not fitting for a fool. · WEB
Sixteen verses on fools and sluggards contain the two contradictory instructions that teach a reader how to use the whole book.
This is the closest thing to a subject cluster in the collections: eleven verses on the fool, then five on the sluggard, with no interruption. The images are deliberately undignified. Honor given to a fool is like snow in summer — not harmful, simply out of season and wrong. Sending a message by a fool is cutting off feet. A proverb in a fool's mouth hangs uselessly like the legs of the lame, and later becomes actively dangerous, like a thorn branch in a drunk man's hand.
At the head of the run stand the two verses the whole book depends on. Don't answer a fool according to his folly, lest you also be like him. And immediately: Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes. They are placed together on purpose. Each names a genuine risk — being dragged down to his level, or leaving him confirmed in his own estimate — and neither is a rule. The reader has to decide which danger is live today, and a collection that puts these two side by side is telling him that this is how every saying in it must be used.
The run's harshest verse is not about a fool at all: Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him. The book's whole enterprise is teaching, and it names the one condition teaching cannot reach. A fool may still be corrected. A man satisfied with his own judgment has closed the only door available.
The sluggard's excuse is quoted and it is magnificent: There is a lion in the road! A fierce lion roams the streets! Not a small excuse — the largest available, and unfalsifiable from the doorway. Then the image that follows it is the funniest in Scripture: As the door turns on its hinges, so does the sluggard on his bed. He is in constant motion and goes nowhere, hinged at one edge.
And the run ends by joining the two subjects. The sluggard is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who answer with discretion. The lazy man is not described as knowing he is lazy. He holds a high opinion of his own judgment, which is why nothing in the chapter will reach him either.
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