Proverbs Analysis

There's no one real setting to speak of in Proverbs, since it's, uh, a collection of proverbs. But we should probably note here that it was an evolving document that might've come out of a few diff...

Wisdom Literature Proverbs is—like Ecclesiastes and, in a different way, Job—a work of ancient Near Eastern Wisdom literature. Unsurprisingly, this is probably best defined as literature d...

The word "proverbs" comes from the Latin translation of the title: "Proverbia." But the original Hebrew word is "mashal," and it has a slightly different meaning. We tend to think of proverbs as be...

The book ends with a description of the "capable wife." She is the perfect opposite of the adulteress and the foolish woman described earlier in Proverbs—she puts in practice the advice given by...

The first letters of twenty-two verses in the "Ode to the Capable Wife," taken together, spell out the full Hebrew Alphabet. (Source.)Proverbs only contains (what it says are) 800 proverbs from Kin...

By Biblical standards, Proverbs is extremely tame—there's no mass slaughter of any kind, no actual sex (despite a long discussion of adultery), no one getting high off of inhalants or whatever (n...

The Gospel of John The Gospel of John's conception of Jesus as "The Word," who existed before the creation of the world, mirrors Proverbs' conception of Wisdom as a similarly pre-existent being.As...