Proverbs 22

Chapter 22 opens the final sequence of the first Solomonic collection. The opening proverb establishes a value hierarchy: a good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favour is better than silver or gold. The contrast between reputation and wealth — both of which the book values, but not equally — recurs throughout the collection. The social-levelling observation follows: the rich and the poor meet together; the Lord is the maker of them all. Whatever the social distance between them, both are creatures of the same maker and both are accountable to the same moral order. The chapter includes the famous child-rearing verse — train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it — and a cluster of poverty-related observations: the lazy man does not plough after autumn; the poor man's field is swept away. The first Solomonic collection ends at verse 16 with the observation that oppressing the poor to increase one's own wealth leads only to want.

At verse 17 the chapter opens a new section with a shift in address and register: incline your ear and hear the words of the wise, and apply your heart to my knowledge. The Words of the Wise (22:17-24:22) are the section most closely related to the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, a New Kingdom wisdom text. The relationship — direct literary dependence, with the Hebrew as the borrowing text in the consensus of scholarship — is the most striking piece of external evidence for the cross-cultural exchange that characterises ancient Near Eastern wisdom literature. The first cluster of sayings warns against robbing the poor, against moving the ancient landmark, against befriending a man given to anger. The section's discursive style is closer to the extended discourses of chapters 1-9 than to the two-line proverbs of chapters 10-22:16.