Proverbs 29

Repeated correction refused, and then a break that cannot be repaired. The verse is about accumulation, not about one bad decision.

Ordinary people can feel who is in charge. The verse measures government by the sound the population makes.

Two sons and two outcomes, and the second line names what actually gets spent. The verse is about where a life's resources end up.

Justice is what holds a country up. Bribery does not merely corrupt it, the verse says it tears it down.

Flattery is trapping equipment. The verse leaves it deliberately unclear whose feet the net is under.

The trap is the transgression itself, not a penalty attached to it. Meanwhile someone else is singing.

Paying attention to a poor person's legal case is treated as a form of knowledge. The verse says the wicked lack it.

Mockery is arson at civic scale. The verse puts a whole city at stake and hands the fire extinguisher to somebody else.

There is no version of this argument that ends well. Rage and laughter are both listed, and both produce the same result.

Violent men hate an innocent man simply for being one. What the upright do about it depends on a phrase that can be read two ways.

Everything comes out of one and not the other. The verse is about discharge, not about whether the feelings exist.

What a leader listens to trains everyone under him. The verse traces corruption downward from a single habit of attention.

The man being crushed and the man crushing him receive the same daylight from the same God. The verse states it flatly and leaves it there.

A throne is secured by how the weakest people are treated in court. The verse names the specific practice that makes a reign last.

Correction forms a child and its absence does not leave him neutral. The verse pairs a rod with words and treats abandonment, not discipline, as the failure it is warning about.

More wicked people means more wrongdoing, which sounds obvious until you notice what the second line does with time.

Correction is presented as something that comes back to the parent, and what it returns is rest. The verse describes a relationship, not a technique.

Where God has stopped speaking, a people runs wild. The verse is about the absence of divine revelation, and it has nothing to do with organizational vision statements.

Some people take in the instruction and do nothing with it. The verse observes the gap between comprehension and response.

The book's harshest comparison, aimed at the man who speaks before thinking. It is the same verdict 26:12 gave the man wise in his own eyes.

Indulge a servant from the beginning and the relationship ends up somewhere neither party planned. Exactly where is debated.

Anger does not stay a mood. The verse tracks it outward into conflict and then into a quantity of wrongdoing.

Pride does the lowering itself. The verse makes it self-acting rather than punished.

Splitting the take costs more than it pays. The second line puts the accomplice in court, under oath, unable to speak.

Being afraid of people traps you. The verse names the alternative and describes it as elevation rather than escape.

Everyone queues at the palace. The verse says the thing they are queuing for is not finally in the building.

The revulsion runs both ways. The book's largest collection ends by saying the two kinds of people cannot stand each other, and it says it symmetrically.