Proverbs13chapter 13

"The lamp of the wicked shall be put out" is a household image before it is a metaphor. An Israelite house had one small clay lamp, a saucer pinched at the lip with a wick floating in olive oil, and a careful family kept it burning through the night. A dark house meant a dead household — which is why an extinguished lamp became the standard picture of a family line ending.

"Much food is in the tillage of the poor; but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment" reflects subsistence farming, where a small plot worked well fed a family and one bad decision — planting late, neglecting the terrace wall, selling seed grain — wiped out the year.

"He that spareth his rod hateth his son" belongs to a world where the father was also the judge, the schoolmaster, and the trade teacher. Correction was physical and expected across the whole ancient Near East. The proverb's own frame, though, ties the rod to love, not to temper — the same pairing the book uses when it compares God's correction to a father's.

"Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase" uses a word for empty, breath-like gain — a windfall, a scheme, plunder. Money that arrived without work also left without notice, since there was nowhere to bank it.