Proverbs 30

A new author is introduced, and the introduction raises more questions than it settles. Who Agur was, who he was speaking to, and what the title word means are all genuinely uncertain.

Agur's opening claim about himself is not humility as a social gesture. He says he is less than an ordinary man, and he says it twice.

He did not get the education and he does not have the knowledge of God. Both halves are denials, and the second one uses the book's own phrase for its highest prize.

Six questions with one answer: not you, and not anyone you can name. The verse is not a riddle to be solved. It is a demonstration of the distance between the questioner and God.

After four verses of not knowing, here is what Agur will say he knows: God's speech has been tested and came through, and the people who trust it are covered.

Do not improve on what God said. The danger named is not that you will be punished for a technical violation but that you will end up misrepresenting Him and be shown to have done it.

The prayer's preface. He asks for two things and asks that they not be withheld for as long as he lives, which tells you he means to need them the whole way.

The two requests: keep me away from what is false, and give me neither extreme of money. The third line defines the middle as a ration rather than a standard of living.

His reasons, and both of them are about God rather than about himself. Wealth might make him forget who God is; poverty might put God's name on a theft.

Do not carry a bad report about someone to the person who has power over them. The reason given is that the wronged servant has one recourse left, and it will find you.

The first of four portraits. Contempt at home, stated in two directions: something said against the father, something withheld from the mother.

The second portrait. A settled sense of being clean, and an actual condition that has not changed. The gap between the two is the whole saying.

The third portrait, and the shortest. No action at all, just a face: eyes raised, lids lifted. The posture is the whole description.

The fourth and final portrait, and the reason the other three were listed. The mouth has become weaponry, and it is aimed at people who cannot defend themselves.

A leech with two daughters whose names are both Give, and then a list opened but not yet filled. The verse cannot be read alone, because the four things it counts are in the next verse.

The list itself: the grave, the barren womb, dry ground, and fire. Four things that take without ever reaching a limit, and none of them is being scolded for it.

The most violent image in Proverbs, and it is a picture rather than a threat. The eye that looked down on a father and mother ends up in a field, unburied, being eaten by birds.

The saying's header, and it is a confession before it is a list. He is not introducing four marvels. He is introducing four things he does not understand.

Four paths, and the first three vanish as they are made. The fourth is a man and a young woman, and it is listed among wonders rather than among warnings.

A fifth way, and the tone changes. Not a wonder now but a picture of someone who has done something and feels nothing, described with the plainness of a person finishing a meal.

The header, and it is deliberately oversized. Four domestic situations are about to be described, and the earth itself is said to stagger under them.

The first two of four. Someone with no preparation holding power, and someone with no judgment holding plenty. Neither is a complaint about where they came from.

The last two, and the first of them is almost certainly not saying what the English suggests. The word behind hateful is passive: she is the one not loved.

The header, and the whole claim is in it. Four creatures with nothing going for them in size, and the verse calls them wise in the strongest form the language has.

The first of four. Ants have no strength and no way to fight for anything, so they solve the problem earlier instead, while there is still summer.

The second of four. A defenceless animal that solved the problem of defence by living somewhere nothing can follow it.

The third of four, and the one that changes the subject. What is missing here is not strength but authority, and the order appears anyway.

The last of four, and it drops the pattern. No weakness is named. The creature simply holds on with its hands, and ends up somewhere no one would have let it in.

The header of the chapter's last list, and the subject is unusual: not strength, not wisdom, but the way something moves.

The first of four, and the obvious one. What the verse praises is not the lion's power but its composure: it does not step aside for anything.

The last three, and the first of them is a genuine puzzle. Whatever animal it is, it is followed by a goat and then by a king, and the list ends on the human.

The chapter's only direct command, and it is addressed to someone already in the wrong: if you have been lifting yourself up, or plotting, stop talking. The hand is a physical instruction.

The reason, in three pictures. Press milk and you get butter, press a nose and you get blood, press anger and you get a fight. Pressure produces, every time, and what it produces depends on what you pressed.