Biblion Bible Commentary
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Two Things I Have Asked of You
Proverbs 30:1-14
1 The words of Agur the son of Jakeh, the revelation: the man says to Ithiel, to Ithiel and Ucal: · WEB
A man who opens by declaring himself ignorant asks God for exactly enough money and nothing more.
Agur begins where nobody in the book has begun. Surely I am the most ignorant man, and don't have a man's understanding. I have not learned wisdom, neither do I have the knowledge of the Holy One. After twenty-nine chapters instructing the simple, the collection admits a voice that says he is one, and it puts him near the end rather than at the beginning.
What follows is a set of questions with no answers offered. Who has ascended into heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in his fists, or bound the waters in a garment, or established all the ends of the earth? Then the last of them, and it is the strangest sentence in the book: What is his name, and what is his son's name, if you know? The questions are rhetorical in form and the passage supplies nothing. It is a man listing what he cannot do and does not know, and stopping there.
Out of that comes a statement about Scripture rather than about wisdom: Every word of God is flawless. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Don't you add to his words. A man who has just confessed he knows nothing locates the thing that can be relied on outside himself, and warns against improving it.
The prayer that follows is the only one in the book and it is remarkable for its modesty. Two requests. Remove far from me falsehood and lies — and then, Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me. Neither. The reasons are given for both, and each is a spiritual danger rather than a discomfort. Full, he might deny God and ask Who is Yahweh? Poor, he might steal and dishonor the name. He is not asking to be protected from hardship. He is asking to be kept out of both conditions in which he does not trust himself.
The section closes with four generations described in turn, and the last is the worst. One curses its father. One is pure in their own eyes, yet are not washed from their filthiness — the book's standing charge, now applied to a whole cohort. One has lifted-up eyes. And the fourth has teeth are like swords, and their jaws like knives, to devour the poor from the earth. The progression runs from contempt for parents to self-satisfaction to arrogance and then to eating the poor, and the collection presents it as one sequence rather than four unrelated faults.
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