Proverbs23chapter 23

Proverbs 23:1-3

When thou sittest to eat with a ruler: The chapter opens at a ruler's table, and the counsel is self-control before it is etiquette: consider diligently what is before thee, and put a knife to thy throat if given to appetite. The dainties are called deceitful meat, because a great man's food can be the bait for a favor he means to extract, and the guest who forgets that eats himself into a debt he did not intend. Bridges reads the verse as training for any table where flattery or advantage sits across from the plate.

Proverbs 23:4-5

Labour not to be rich: Labour not to be rich sets the limit, and cease from thine own wisdom names the trap, a man's own cleverness scheming for money he was never meant to chase. Riches certainly make themselves wings and fly away as an eagle toward heaven is the book's sharpest picture of wealth's instability, gone by its own motion and not by theft. Gill and Henry both point the proverb at the pursuit rather than at possession itself; a man may have riches without labouring after them, and the warning falls on the striving heart.

Proverbs 23:6-8

the bread of him that hath an evil eye: The evil eye here is the stingy host, one whose invitation is a performance: Eat and drink, saith he to thee, but his heart is not with thee. As he thinketh in his heart, so is he reads the man's true measure by his private calculation rather than his public words, and the guest who trusts the show will vomit up the morsel and lose the sweet words he spoke in thanks. Delitzsch notes the proverb as a warning against reading generosity from a mouth alone.

Proverbs 23:9

Speak not in the ears of a fool: Speak not in the ears of a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of thy words stands as its own single proverb and matches the pearls-before-swine counsel the tradition drew from it. The fool's contempt is not a failure of the speaker's argument but the fixed condition of the hearer, and Bridges reads the verse as teaching discernment about audience rather than silence as a virtue in itself.

Proverbs 23:10-11

Remove not the old landmark: Remove not the old landmark repeats a command already given at 22:28, and the added clause here names the class it protects, the fields of the fatherless. The reason given is not merely law but a person: their redeemer is mighty, he shall plead their cause with thee, God himself standing as the goel for the orphan whose boundary stone a stronger neighbor has quietly moved. Henry ties the redeemer language to the same office Job invokes at Job 19:25, the living kinsman-avenger who takes up a weak man's case.

Proverbs 23:12-14

Apply thine heart unto instruction: Apply thine heart unto instruction reopens the father's direct appeal after the ruler-and-landmark sayings, and the rod verses that follow are among the book's plainest on discipline: withhold not correction, for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt deliver his soul from hell states the stakes in the starkest terms the collection uses, correction aimed at the child's whole future rather than at the moment's offense. The commentators read the passage inside its ancient household setting and never as counsel detached from the father's evident love in the surrounding verses.

Proverbs 23:15-16

my heart shall rejoice: The father turns from correction to affection without a seam: if thine heart be wise, my heart shall rejoice, even mine, and my reins shall rejoice, when thy lips speak right things. Bridges hears in even mine the father insisting on his own stake in the son's wisdom, not a teacher's satisfaction but a parent's joy, and the reins, the innermost organs in Hebrew idiom, name a gladness felt in the body and not only approved in the mind.

Proverbs 23:17-18

Let not thine heart envy sinners: Let not thine heart envy sinners answers the pressure that runs through the whole book, watching the wicked prosper, with a single correction: be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long. For surely there is an end, and thine expectation shall not be cut off promises an outcome the present moment cannot show, and Henry reads it as the same patience Psalm 73 works through at length, envy dissolved by looking to the last account rather than the present balance.

Proverbs 23:19-21

Hear thou, my son, and be wise: Hear thou, my son, and be wise opens a fresh appeal that runs straight into the chapter's long drunkard poem, and these verses give its first, plainer form: be not among winebibbers, among riotous eaters of flesh. The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty names two appetites in one sentence, and drowsiness clothing a man with rags pictures the slow, unnoticed decline rather than a single dramatic ruin. Gill reads the pairing of drink and food as the same undisciplined appetite working in two directions at once.

Proverbs 23:22

Hearken unto thy father: Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old renews the fifth commandment's honor across a whole lifetime, naming the temptation directly: not only obeying a young child's parent but honoring an aged one whose usefulness a careless son might discount. Henry reads when she is old as the verse's real weight, since honor is easy while parents are strong and becomes the test only once they are not.

Proverbs 23:23

Buy the truth, and sell it not: Buy the truth, and sell it not stands as one of the book's most quoted lines, truth priced as a possession worth any cost and never worth surrendering once owned. Also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding widens the same command across the book's whole vocabulary for the wise life, and Bridges notes that buying implies labor and sacrifice, not a gift that falls into the lap unearned.

Proverbs 23:24-25

The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice: The father of the righteous shall greatly rejoice answers the earlier promise of verse 15 from the other side, the parent's gladness now stated as the settled outcome of a wise child rather than a hoped-for feeling. Thy father and thy mother shall be glad, and she that bare thee shall rejoice names the mother a second time by her own act of bearing, and Gill reads the doubled naming of father and mother together as the verse's deliberate completeness.

Proverbs 23:26-28

give me thine heart: My son, give me thine heart is the father's plainest request in the whole book, and it opens directly into the warning against the strange woman: a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit, the two images sharing the same danger, a fall a man does not see coming and cannot easily climb back out of. She also lieth in wait as for a prey names the predatory side of the danger the earlier chapters already drew, and Bridges reads give me thine heart as the whole chapter's real subject, since a heart already given has no room left for the pit to catch.

Proverbs 23:29-30

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow?: The chapter closes with its strangest and most vivid poem, six rhetorical questions fired in a row before the answer ever comes: who hath woe, who hath sorrow, who hath contentions, who hath babbling, who hath wounds without cause, who hath redness of eyes. The answer lands as its own line, they that tarry long at the wine, they that go to seek mixed wine, the riddle's suspense itself part of the poem's craft. Delitzsch reads the piled questions as deliberately overwhelming, mimicking the drunkard's own scattered, complaining speech before the reader ever reaches the cause.

Proverbs 23:31-32

Look not thou upon the wine when it is red: Look not thou upon the wine when it is red carries the poem into direct address, the color and movement in the cup described with real fascination before the trap springs: at the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. Henry reads the serpent figure as the poem's turn, the same wine that looked beautiful in the glass proving venomous in the end, the pleasure and the poison packed into one image rather than two separate warnings.

Proverbs 23:33-35

Thine eyes shall behold strange women: The poem's last lines follow the drunkard past the cup into the ruin it produces: strange women seen where they should not be, a perverse heart, and a body so numbed it is like a man lying down in the midst of the sea or on the top of a mast, danger everywhere and no sense of it. The final verse gives the drunkard his own voice, they have stricken me and I was not sick, I felt it not, when shall I awake, I will seek it yet again, and Bridges reads the last line as the poem's true horror, not ignorance of the harm but the resolve to return to it anyway.