Proverbs9chapter 9

Proverbs 9:1-6

Wisdom builds a house and hews seven pillars, and the bench takes the number as the figure of completeness the book uses elsewhere rather than an architectural report, a table fully furnished for whoever will come. She kills her beasts, mingles her wine and sends her maidens out with the invitation, and the summons is public exactly as chapter 8 was public: whoso is simple, let him turn in hither. Forsake the foolish, and live names the cost of the invitation before it names the gift, an exchange the guest must make to sit down at all.

Proverbs 9:7-9

Between the two tables the chapter pauses for a rule about correction itself: reprove a scorner and he hates you for it, but rebuke a wise man and he loves you for it, the same words landing as insult in one hearer and as gift in another. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser turns the rule into a test a reader can apply to himself, since the response to reproof is offered as the very evidence of which table a man is sitting at. Henry reads the placement as deliberate, a warning against wasting counsel on a heart already closed before the invitation to Wisdom's table is even extended.

Proverbs 9:10-12

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: The book's motto returns at the seam between its two great sections, restating 1:7 almost word for word and marking this chapter as a hinge rather than one more scene. The knowledge of the holy is understanding pairs fear with knowing God himself, so that wisdom is never presented as technique detached from a relationship to the Lord it begins in. If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself keeps the offer personal to the last line before the second woman appears, since scorning wisdom's table costs no one but the one who scorns it.

Proverbs 9:13-18

Folly sets a counter-table built entirely as Wisdom's mirror image, sitting at her own door on a seat in the high places of the city, calling the same passengers with the same opening line, whoso is simple, let him turn in hither. Her menu is the chapter's whole argument in two clauses, stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant, pleasure claimed only because it is taken rather than given. The narrator supplies what the guest cannot see from where he sits, he knoweth not that the dead are there, and her guests are in the depths of hell, closing the chapter and the first nine chapters together on the same choice the book opened with.