She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She doeth him good and not evil All the days of her life.
She hath done him good, and not evil, All days of her life.
She doeth him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.
Solomon ruled at the one moment Israel was a wealthy international power. First Kings 10 describes gold arriving by the ton, ships trading as far as Ophir, ivory and apes and peacocks, and a queen from Sheba who traveled a thousand miles just to test his wisdom. First Kings 4:32 says he spoke three thousand proverbs and wrote a thousand and five songs. Proverbs is a selection from a much larger body of work.
Every great kingdom of that world ran schools for scribes. Egypt had a long shelf of "instruction" books in which a father or an official trained his son for public life. The best known is the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, and its advice overlaps strikingly with Proverbs 22:17–24:22 — do not rob the poor, do not move a boundary stone, do not make friends with a hot-tempered man. Wise observation about how life works was shared across the ancient world.
What made Israel's version different was its foundation. Proverbs takes that shared common sense and rebuilds it on one starting point: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (1:7). Truth spotted by an Egyptian scribe is still truth, but here it is gathered under the covenant God of Israel rather than a crowd of gods.
Two centuries after Solomon, King Hezekiah's men went back into the royal archives and copied out more of his proverbs (25:1). Hezekiah was the reforming king who cleaned out idol worship and reopened the temple, and this scribal project belongs to that revival. The last chapter, the acrostic poem about the woman of valor, runs from the first Hebrew letter to the last — wisdom shown as a whole life rather than a lecture.
To its first hearers, Proverbs was survival training for a teenager. It talked about the things that actually ruin a young life: money handled badly, promises signed for strangers, laziness, a mouth that runs, and the seductive woman waiting at dusk on the corner of her street. The father is not being poetic; he is trying to get his son through to adulthood intact.
It also taught them that the world is not random. God built moral order into creation the way He built gravity into it, so the wise life runs with the grain and generally flourishes, while folly runs against it and eventually splinters. That word "generally" mattered even then — a proverb is a true observation about how life usually goes, not a contract God is obliged to honor, which is why Job and Ecclesiastes sit right beside it in the same canon.
Proverbs — Gnomic wisdom — sayings, instructions, and the binary of wisdom vs. folly. Fear of the LORD as the integrative theme; the virtuous woman of Prov 31 as the book's closing portrait of wisdom embodied.
Voices3
"She brings him good, and not harm," etc. For the soul renders good to Christ when, receiving the gifts of life from Him, it responds by living rightly, when it strives to impart to others that which through His help it can know or do. …
Bede· Commentary on Proverbs, 735patristic
She will do him good, and not evil,....
John Gill· Exposition of the Entire Bible, 1771reformed
She will do him good - 4. She has her husbands happiness in view constantly. She recompenses all his kindness to her in beneficent acts. For kind words she returns kind deeds. 1. Her good is unmixed; she will do him good. and not evil. 2 Her good is not capricious; it is constant and permanent, while she and her husband live. His heart safely trusts in her, for she will do him good all the days of her life. This is her general character.
Adam Clarke· Commentary on the Bible, 1832evangelical
Rare words are the text's own signal of a deliberate thread — the fewer the occurrences, the more the places it appears belong together.
The verses this one reaches2
Then Abigail hurried and took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five butchered sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred clusters of raisins, and two hundred cakes of figs. She loaded them on donkeys
Now, my lord, as surely as the LORD lives and you yourself live, the LORD has held you back from coming to bloodshed and avenging yourself with your own hand. May your enemies and those who seek harm for my lord be like Nabal.