Happy Is the Man Who Finds Wisdom
13 Happy is the man who finds wisdom, the man who gets understanding. 14 For her good profit is better than getting silver, and her return is better than fine gold. 15 She is more precious than rubies. None of the things you can desire are to be compared to her. 16 Length of days is in her right hand. In her left hand are riches and honor. 17 Her ways are ways of pleasantness. All her paths are peace. 18 She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her. Happy is everyone who retains her. 19 By wisdom Yahweh founded the earth. By understanding, he established the heavens. 20 By his knowledge, the depths were broken up, and the skies drop down the dew. 21 My son, let them not depart from your eyes. Keep sound wisdom and discretion, 22 so they will be life to your soul, and grace for your neck. 23 Then you shall walk in your way securely. Your foot won’t stumble. 24 When you lie down, you will not be afraid. Yes, you will lie down, and your sleep will be sweet. 25 Don’t be afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it comes; 26 for Yahweh will be your confidence, and will keep your foot from being taken. 27 Don’t withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hand to do it. 28 Don’t say to your neighbor, “Go, and come again; tomorrow I will give it to you,” when you have it by you. 29 Don’t devise evil against your neighbor, since he dwells securely by you. 30 Don’t strive with a man without cause, if he has done you no harm. 31 Don’t envy the man of violence. Choose none of his ways. 32 For the perverse is an abomination to Yahweh, but his friendship is with the upright. 33 Yahweh’s curse is in the house of the wicked, but he blesses the habitation of the righteous. 34 Surely he mocks the mockers, but he gives grace to the humble. 35 The wise will inherit glory, but shame will be the promotion of fools.
Wisdom is priced against silver and gold, credited with founding the earth, and then applied to whether you make a neighbor come back tomorrow.
The valuation is done carefully and in stages. Better than silver. Better than fine gold. More precious than rubies — and then the line that closes the comparison: None of the things you can desire are to be compared to her. The market has been surveyed and nothing on it is in the same category. What she holds is then described as a pair of hands, length of days in the right and riches and honor in the left, which is the posture of someone offering rather than withholding.
The strongest phrase in the passage is a quiet one: She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her. That image had appeared once before in Scripture, in a garden, guarded after a man was put out Genesis 3:24. Its reappearance here, as something a person may take hold of, is the most hopeful sentence in the first nine chapters, and the book does not explain it. It states it and moves on.
Then the ground of the whole thing: By wisdom Yahweh founded the earth. By understanding, he established the heavens. This is the book's central claim about why its advice works. Wisdom is not a technique somebody invented that happens to succeed. It is the pattern the world was made on, so that living wisely is running with the grain of what is actually there, and folly is not merely wrong but at odds with the structure of things.
What follows that cosmic statement is the surprise, and it is characteristic of the book. Having said that wisdom founded the earth, the chapter turns immediately to a man who owes his neighbor something: Don't say to your neighbor, "Go, and come again; tomorrow I will give it to you," when you have it by you. The wisdom that established the heavens is applied to a small delay, made for no reason, at somebody else's expense.
The rest of the section keeps that register. Do not withhold good when it is in your power to do it. Do not devise evil against a neighbor who lives trustingly beside you. Do not pick a fight with a man who has done you no harm. Do not envy a violent man. And the verse that gathers them: he mocks the mockers, but he gives grace to the humble. The line is quoted twice in the New Testament as a settled principle James 4:6 1 Peter 5:5, and in its own setting it is the reason the previous four instructions are worth following.
settled What this mark means