Proverbs 13

The chapter opens where the book always opens: on whether a person can be told anything. The wise son listens; the scoffer does not.

Both men eat what their words produce. One gets a meal; the other develops an appetite for harm.

Watch what you say and you keep your life. The verse treats speech as the most dangerous thing most people handle daily.

Wanting is not the same as working. Both men in this verse want things, and only one of them ends up with any.

Not merely avoids lying. Hates it, which is a statement about what a person finds intolerable rather than what they manage to abstain from.

What a person is made of does the protecting, or the toppling. The verse assigns the active role to the character rather than to an outside force.

Appearances invert. The verse describes two people performing a financial position that is not theirs, and it declines to say which is which.

Money can buy a wealthy man out of danger, and it can also be why he is in danger. The poor man has neither problem.

Two sources of light and only one keeps burning. The verse says nothing about brightness, only about duration.

Pride's only reliable product is a fight. The alternative in the second line is not humility as a mood but the practice of taking counsel.

Money that arrives fast and crooked tends to leave the same way. Money assembled by hand tends to stay.

Waiting for something that does not come makes a person ill, and the verse says so without scolding anyone for it. The relief, when it arrives, is life-giving.

Contempt for instruction has a cost, and respect for it has a return. The verse is about posture toward counsel, not about a legal code.

Good teaching is a water source, and its practical function is to route a person around traps they would not have seen.

Sense earns goodwill. The second line's word is unusual, and translations reach for different things.

The prudent man's knowledge shows up in what he does. The fool's folly shows up too, and he is the one displaying it.

A message is only as good as the person carrying it. The verse is about the courier rather than the content.

Refusing correction costs money and standing. Accepting it earns respect, which most people expect to work the other way around.

Getting what you wanted is sweet. The second line explains why fools will not turn, and the two halves are more connected than they look.

You become the company you keep. The verb is walking, which means time and proximity rather than admiration from a distance.

Consequence is described as a pursuer. The verse gives trouble legs and lets it do the chasing.

A good life plans past its own lifetime. The second line observes that ill-gotten wealth tends not to stay where it was gathered, and it is not a mechanism anyone can invoke.

The poor are not short of capacity. Their ground could feed people, and what destroys the harvest is named plainly: injustice.

The verse's own vocabulary decides how it must be read. Withholding correction is what it calls hatred and correcting is what it calls love, so motive is the test, and rage is disqualified by the sentence being quoted.

The chapter ends at a table. One man is satisfied; the other is not, and the difference is described as an appetite rather than a supply.