Proverbs 10

The main collection opens at home: a child's wisdom gladdens a father, and a child's folly grieves a mother. An observation about how deeply parents feel their children's choices, not a formula for producing wise children or a verdict on grieving parents.

Money gained the wrong way cannot buy the thing you will actually need, and righteousness reaches where wealth cannot. The proverb weighs two kinds of security against each other at the point where all security is tested.

God actively sustains the righteous and frustrates the appetite of the wicked. A statement about the LORD's ongoing government of the world, observed as a pattern; not a contract clause that no believer will ever go hungry.

A slack hand and a diligent hand tend toward opposite ends. An observation about the ordinary economics of effort, not a verdict declaring every poor person lazy or every rich person diligent.

Diligence is not only effort; it is timing. Harvest does not wait, and the son who sleeps through it loses what no later work can recover.

Blessing rests visibly on the righteous, while violence dominates the wicked mouth: either concealed behind it or returning to silence it. The Hebrew permits both readings, and both tell the truth about where violence finally lands.

A righteous life keeps blessing people after it ends; its memory becomes a benediction. A wicked name decomposes.

The wise person can take instruction; the fool is too busy talking to hear any, and he falls.

Integrity lets you walk without watching your back, because there is nothing behind you to surface. The crooked man lives with a countdown: what he has twisted will come out.

The winker is the man running a scheme in plain sight, signaling over your head, and he leaves trouble behind him. The second line repeats 10:8: the fool of lips falls.

A righteous person's speech is a water source: people drink from it and live. The wicked mouth has violence where the water should be.

Hatred keeps conflict alive by keeping offenses in circulation; love takes offenses out of circulation by covering them. This is the proverb behind "love covers a multitude of sins," and covering means absorbing a wrong rather than broadcasting it, not concealing abuse or evading justice.

Where understanding lives in a person, wisdom shows up in their speech. Where understanding is absent, correction arrives from outside instead, the hard way. The verse contrasts two teachers: your own understanding, or consequences.

The wise bank knowledge and spend it carefully; the fool's mouth pays everything out the moment it arrives, and destruction is never far from it.

Money functions as a fortress: it absorbs shocks for the rich that fall with full force on the poor. Clear-eyed observation, not endorsement.

What the righteous earn feeds life; what the wicked earn feeds more sin. The verse follows the money one step past the paycheck, to what the earnings become.

Holding onto instruction keeps you on the road of life; refusing correction walks you off it. Correction is navigation in this verse.

Two failures with hatred: concealing it behind a smiling face makes you a liar, and venting it as slander makes you a fool. The proverb closes both exits.

Talk enough and sin will be in there somewhere: the more we speak, the more opportunities we create for exaggeration, disclosure, judgment, and harm. Restraint is wisdom because it closes most of those doors before they open.

A righteous person's words assay as refined silver; a wicked person's heart assays as nearly nothing. The mismatch of body parts is the point: speech reveals what the heart holds.

Righteous speech is food, and it feeds crowds; the fool cannot even feed himself, and dies hungry for the one thing he would not take in.

The verse credits material provision to the LORD's blessing rather than human striving alone. Depending on how the second line is translated, His blessing either comes without sorrow attached or cannot be improved by anxious toil. It does not promise wealth to every faithful person, and it does not diagnose the unwealthy as unblessed.

The fool finds evil fun; it is his recreation. The man of understanding finds the same delight in wisdom. What a person does for pleasure is one of the most honest windows into who they are.

What the wicked man dreads finds him, and what the righteous man longs for is granted. The proverb observes the long trajectories of dread and desire under God's government; it is not a blank check for wishes.

The storm is the test both lives were always going to meet. It carries the wicked away entirely and reveals the righteous standing on something the wind cannot reach: a foundation that outlasts the weather.

Send a sluggard on an errand and you will feel it the way teeth feel vinegar and eyes feel smoke: sharp, maddening, and entirely predictable.

Living rightly oriented toward God tends toward long life, and wickedness tends to cut life short. The observed grain of how lives run, not an actuarial guarantee.

The righteous man's hope matures into joy; the wicked man's expectation dies before delivery. Both men are waiting for something. The proverb is about which kind of waiting has a future.

The same way of the LORD is experienced as a stronghold by the upright and as ruin by workers of iniquity. One reality, two experiences of it, decided by how a life is oriented toward it.

The righteous are permanent; the wicked have no lasting tenancy. A rootedness proverb, spoken in the long tense of God's government, not the short tense of tomorrow's news.

The righteous mouth is fruitful ground; wisdom grows out of it season after season. The perverse tongue gets the fate of a barren plant: cut down.

Righteous lips have a trained sense for the fitting word; the wicked mouth is fluent only in distortion. The chapter closes its speech theme on the note of instinct.