Proverbs — who's who

The book's organising figure and most theologically consequential personification. She appears first in chapter 1, raising her voice in the streets and the chief places of concourse, calling to the simple to turn in to her. Her great speech is in chapter 8: she was possessed by the Lord in the beginning of his way, before his works of old; she was set up from everlasting; when he prepared the heavens, she was there; she was daily his delight, rejoicing in the habitable part of the earth, and her delights were with the sons of men. The passage became, in later Jewish interpretation, the locus classicus for the doctrine of personified Wisdom, and in early Christian interpretation it was read as referring to Christ as the pre-existent Wisdom of God. In chapter 9 she builds her house with seven pillars, sets her table, and sends out her maidens to call. Every proverb in the long collections is, finally, a footnote to her.

Wisdom's structural counterpart in chapter 9. She also sits at the door of her house, also calls to the simple, also offers food — but her food is bread eaten in secret and her drink is stolen waters. 'Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant' is the book's best compact statement of the appeal of folly: not that folly looks like folly, but that it looks like a private pleasure that the public virtues cannot quite reach. Her house, the chapter says with characteristic directness, is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. She is connected across chapters 1-9 with the strange woman — the seductive figure who appears in chapters 2, 5, 6, and 7 in long, vivid passages warning the young man against her.

The voice that speaks the opening discourses, addressed throughout to 'my son.' He is the figure of the wisdom teacher in the form most ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature uses: a father — or a king-as-father — instructing his son in how to live. The voice is firm, affectionate, urgent, and repetitive — the same warnings come back across the chapters because they are warnings about choices the son has not yet made and may make at any time. He warns against keeping bad company (chapter 1), against sexual sin and especially the strange woman (chapters 5-7), against laziness (chapters 6 and 24, with the famous go-to-the-ant), against suretyship for a stranger (chapter 6), against the pride that goes before a fall (chapter 16). His voice holds chapters 1-9 together.

The implied recipient of the opening discourses and, by extension, of the whole book. He is young, simple — petai in Hebrew, the word for the unformed person who has not yet chosen the way — and he is the one for whom Wisdom and Folly are competing. The book is structured as his education. The fact that the addressee is grammatically male reflects the social setting in which the book was composed; functionally, the addressee is anyone at the threshold of the choices that constitute a life — about speech, about money, about company, about sex, about temper. By chapter 31, when the woman of valour appears, the son has presumably grown up and is being shown what the wise marriage looks like.

Author of chapter 30. Otherwise unknown outside this book. His oracle opens with a startling confession of ignorance — 'I am the most ignorant of men; I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the Holy One' — a sharp contrast to the confidence of the rest of Proverbs. Then he moves through the unsearchable name, the danger of wealth and poverty both (give me neither, lest I deny you), and the famous sequence of numerical proverbs: three things which are too wonderful for me, yea four which I know not; four things which are little upon the earth but exceeding wise; four things which are comely in going. The chapter is the most distinctive in the book and the most inward at the limits of knowledge.

The heading of chapter 31 is unique in the Hebrew Bible: the words of King Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him. Nothing else is known of Lemuel. His mother's instruction occupies the first nine verses: do not give your strength to women; give strong drink to the dying, wine to the bitter of soul; open your mouth for the speechless, judge righteously, defend the poor and needy. The instruction is practical, royal, and — as the note about his mother specifies — the only direct attribution to a female author in the Hebrew Bible. It introduces the eshet chayil poem that closes the book.

The figure who closes the book. The alphabetic acrostic poem of twenty-two verses celebrates eshet chayil, a woman of valour, whose price is far above rubies. She is no figure of leisure. She seeks wool and flax and works willingly with her hands. She brings her food from afar. She rises while it is yet night and gives meat to her household. She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard. Strength and honour are her clothing. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness. Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also praises her. The poem is read every Sabbath eve in observant Jewish households as the husband's song to the wife. As the closing image of the book, she is the embodied form of Lady Wisdom: not the mythic figure in the streets, but the woman of valour in a particular household, doing the work the book has been describing for thirty chapters.