Proverbs 23

¹ When you sit down to dine with a ruler, consider carefully what is set before you,

² and put a knife to your throat if you possess a great appetite.

³ Do not crave his delicacies, for that food is deceptive.

⁴ Do not wear yourself out to get rich; be wise enough to restrain yourself.

⁵ When you glance at wealth, it disappears, for it makes wings for itself and flies like an eagle to the sky.

⁶ Do not eat the bread of a stingy man, and do not crave his delicacies;

⁷ for he is keeping track, inwardly counting the cost. “Eat and drink,” he says to you, but his heart is not with you.

⁸ You will vomit up what little you have eaten and waste your pleasant words.

⁹ Do not speak to a fool, for he will despise the wisdom of your words.

¹⁰ Do not move an ancient boundary stone or encroach on the fields of the fatherless,

¹¹ for their Redeemer is strong; He will take up their case against you.

¹² Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.

¹³ Do not withhold discipline from a child; although you strike him with a rod, he will not die.

¹⁴ Strike him with a rod, and you will deliver his soul from Sheol.

¹⁵ My son, if your heart is wise, my own heart will indeed rejoice.

¹⁶ My inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right.

¹⁷ Do not let your heart envy sinners, but always continue in the fear of the LORD.

¹⁸ For surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.

¹⁹ Listen, my son, and be wise, and guide your heart on the right course.

²⁰ Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat.

²¹ For the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and drowsiness will clothe them in rags.

²² Listen to your father who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old.

²³ Invest in truth and never sell it—in wisdom and instruction and understanding.

²⁴ The father of a righteous man will greatly rejoice, and he who fathers a wise son will delight in him.

²⁵ May your father and mother be glad, and may she who gave you birth rejoice!

²⁶ My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes delight in my ways.

²⁷ For a prostitute is a deep pit, and an adulteress is a narrow well.

²⁸ Like a robber she lies in wait and multiplies the faithless among men.

²⁹ Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaints? Who has needless wounds? Who has bloodshot eyes?

³⁰ Those who linger over wine, who go to taste mixed drinks.

³¹ Do not gaze at wine while it is red, when it sparkles in the cup and goes down smoothly.

³² In the end it bites like a snake and stings like a viper.

³³ Your eyes will see strange things, and your mind will utter perversities.

³⁴ You will be like one sleeping on the high seas or lying on the top of a mast:

³⁵ “They struck me, but I feel no pain! They beat me, but I did not know it! When can I wake up to search for another drink?”

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Through This Lens

correspondences between particular chapters of Amenemope's text and particular verses in the

Words of the Wise. Working through four of the most clearly documented parallel pairs reveals the depth of the literary relationship. " The imagery continues with the observation that wealth is impermanent.

Proverbs 23:4-5 transposes this directly: "Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist. " The eagle with wings is the same reach for an image of sudden, irreversible disappearance. Both texts use the instruction context to warn a young man in the scribal class — the kind of person who might aspire to wealth through administrative success — against making wealth acquisition the consuming goal of life.

" This is advice for someone in the scribal administrative class — the class Amenemope himself occupied as an official overseeing agricultural lands. Proverbs 22:29 gives the same observation in the Hebrew register: "Do you see a man skillful in his work? " The parallel is tight enough that the same career aspiration — scribal excellence leading to royal court access — is being used in both texts as the motivating argument for applying oneself to the wisdom instruction at hand.

The Egyptian and Israelite sages were, quite literally, addressing students in the same professional context. " The boundary stone was the legal marker of land ownership in the ancient Near East — a sacred and legally protected marker whose violation constituted theft of the worst kind, targeting the property of families across generations. " The same warning, the same Egyptian agricultural context (Amenemope was an official of agricultural lands — his concern with boundary stones was professional, not merely moral), and the same social-ethical instruction.

" The repetition suggests the boundary stone instruction is load-bearing in the Words of the Wise, not merely incidental.

Proverbs 22:17-24:22 — Amenemope ANE Literary

Dependency and the Words of the Wise: Israel's Most Impressive Act of Cultural Intelligence What Israel did with Egyptian wisdom is one of the most impressive acts of cultural intelligence in the ancient Near East. The section of Proverbs that runs from 22:17 through 24:22 — identified in the text itself as the "Words of the Wise" — is not simply a collection of good advice. It is a Yahwistically transformed adaptation of one of the great instructional texts of the ancient world: the Instruction of Amenemope, an Egyptian wisdom document from the late New Kingdom period, composed approximately 1200 BCE, authored by a scribe named Amenemope son of Kanakht, and preserved on British Museum Papyrus 10474 in 30 chapters.

This is not a tentative connection that careful readers might notice. It is scholarly consensus — documented by James B. Pritchard in Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET, Princeton University Press, 3rd ed.

1969), examined in detail by Michael V. Fox in the Anchor Bible commentaries on Proverbs (2000, 2009), and treated as established in mainstream biblical scholarship across the tradition. The Amenemope-Proverbs relationship is the most extensively documented case of direct literary borrowing in the Hebrew Bible.

Understanding it changes how you read this section — and what you make of the wisdom tradition Israel was participating in.

"Incline Your Ear": The Genre Shift at Proverbs 22:17 and the Return to Instruction Discourse

The first thing to notice when you reach Proverbs 22:17 is that something changes. The short, punchy sentence proverbs of chapters 10 through 22:16 — the antithetical one-liners, the observations about the righteous and the wicked stacked one after another — give way to something older and more expansive. "Incline your ear and hear the words of the wise, and apply your heart to my knowledge" (22:17).

The "incline your ear" formula is not decoration; it is a genre marker. The instruction discourse genre — the father addressing the son with sustained, multi-verse instructional units — was the form of Proverbs 1 through 9. It is the form of the Egyptian sebayit tradition: Ptahhotep, Ani, and Amenemope all open with the same gesture.

"Hear," the teacher says, and then the instruction begins in earnest. When Proverbs 22:17 returns to this formula after twelve chapters of sentence proverbs, it signals a return to the pedagogical mode of the prologue — the extended discourse form that requires the student to sit still, listen at length, and receive a sustained argument rather than a series of one-liners. The parallel to Amenemope's opening is direct.

" The opening formula is so close that scholars recognized the connection before the full extent of the parallel catalog had been mapped.

Related Passages

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correspondences between particular chapters of Amenemope's text and particular verses in the

" The repetition suggests the boundary stone instruction is load-bearing in the Words of the Wise, not merely incidental.