Biblion Bible Commentary
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Open Your Mouth for the Mute
Proverbs 31:1-9
1 The words of King Lemuel—the revelation which his mother taught him: · WEB
A queen mother teaches her son how to be a king, and what she tells him is to drink less and speak for people who cannot speak.
The heading credits the material twice over and neither credit is to the king. The words of King Lemuel—the revelation which his mother taught him. The book that opened with the wisest king in Israel closes its instruction with a woman teaching her son, and her name is not given.
She begins with the intensity of a mother rather than a counselor: Oh, my son! Oh, son of my womb! Oh, son of my vows! Then two warnings. The first is brief and it concerns women — don't give your strength to women, nor your ways to that which destroys kings — which is the subject the father's discourses spent four chapters on, compressed into a line.
The second is longer and it is about drink, and her reasoning is entirely about other people. It is not for kings, Lemuel, it is not for kings to drink wine... lest they drink, and forget the law, and pervert the justice due to anyone who is afflicted. The danger she names is not the king's health or dignity. It is that a drinking judge forgets the law, and the person who pays for that is the one already afflicted.
What she says next is easy to miss and is one of the most compassionate provisions in Scripture. Give strong drink to him who is ready to perish, and wine to the bitter in soul. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more. The very thing forbidden to the king is directed to the dying and the desperate. She is not recommending drunkenness as a solution to poverty; she is distinguishing between a man whose judgment governs a nation and a man whose suffering has no other relief, and she will not apply one rule to both.
The instruction ends with the sentence her son's whole office is reduced to: Open your mouth for the mute, in the cause of all who are left desolate. Open your mouth, judge righteously, and serve justice to the poor and needy. Twice she tells him to open his mouth, having just told him what would close it. A king's voice is described as belonging to the people who have none, and that is the last thing said before the poem.
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