Proverbs 30: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

This chapter is a separate collection labeled as the words of Agur son of Jakeh. It opens with Agur admitting he has not learned wisdom, asking who has ever controlled the sky, wind, water and earth, and praying for a life with neither poverty nor riches. The rest is a series of numbered sayings and short lists: four kinds of people who curse their parents or crush the poor, four things never satisfied, four things too wonderful to understand, four the earth cannot bear, four small but wise creatures, and four with a stately walk. It ends with a warning to keep quiet after pride or scheming, because stirring up anger produces conflict.

Claim by Claim

1. 30:1
   • These are the words of Agur son of Jakeh.
   • Agur's father is named Jakeh.
   • The words are called an oracle or burden.
   • The word rendered 'prophecy' can also be read as the place or tribal name Massa, so it is ambiguous whether Agur is being identified as a Massaite.
   • The man made this declaration to Ithiel.
   • The declaration was made to Ithiel and to Ucal.
   • The closing words of the verse are ambiguous: they can be read as two personal names, Ithiel and Ucal, or as a speaker's complaint that he is weary and worn out.
2. 30:2
   • The speaker says he is more brutish than any man.
   • The speaker says he does not have the understanding of a man.
3. 30:3
   • The speaker says he has not learned wisdom.
   • The speaker says he does not have knowledge of the Holy One.
   • The word for 'holy' is plural, so it is ambiguous whether the knowledge lacked is of the Holy One or of holy ones.
4. 30:4
   • The speaker asks who has ascended into heaven and come down.
   • The speaker asks who has gathered the wind in his fists.
   • The speaker asks who has bound the waters in a garment.
   • The speaker asks who has established all the ends of the earth.
   • The speaker asks what that one's name is.
   • The speaker asks what the name of that one's son is.
   • The speaker challenges the hearer to tell, if he can.
   • The final clause is ambiguous between 'if you know' and 'surely you know'.
5. 30:5
   • Every word of God is refined and pure.
   • God is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
6. 30:6
   • The hearer is told not to add to God's words.
   • If he adds, God will reprove him.
   • If he adds, he will be shown to be a liar.
7. 30:7
   • The speaker says he has asked two things of God.
   • The speaker asks God not to withhold them from him before he dies.
8. 30:8
   • The speaker asks God to remove falsehood and lying words far from him.
   • The speaker asks God to give him neither poverty nor riches.
   • The speaker asks God to feed him with the food that is his allotted portion.
9. 30:9
   • The speaker fears that if he is full he will deny God.
   • The speaker fears that if he is full he will say, 'Who is the LORD?'
   • The speaker fears that if he becomes poor he will steal.
   • The speaker fears that if he steals he will lay hold of the name of his God wrongly.
10. 30:10
    • The hearer is told not to slander a servant to his master.
    • If he does, the servant will curse him.
    • If he does, he will bear the guilt.
11. 30:11
    • There is a generation that curses its father.
    • That generation does not bless its mother.
12. 30:12
    • There is a generation that is pure in its own eyes.
    • That generation has not been washed from its filth.
13. 30:13
    • There is a generation whose eyes are lofty.
    • That generation's eyelids are lifted up.
14. 30:14
    • There is a generation whose teeth are swords.
    • That generation's jaw teeth are knives.
    • That generation devours the poor from off the earth.
    • That generation devours the needy from among men.
15. 30:15
    • The leech has two daughters.
    • The two daughters cry, 'Give, give.'
    • There are three things that are never satisfied.
    • There are four things that never say, 'It is enough.'
16. 30:16
    • Sheol, the grave, is never satisfied.
    • The barren womb is never satisfied.
    • The earth is not filled with water.
    • Fire never says, 'It is enough.'
17. 30:17
    • There is an eye that mocks at its father.
    • That eye despises obedience to its mother.
    • The ravens of the valley will pick out that eye.
    • The young eagles will eat that eye.
    • The bird named can be either an eagle or a vulture.
18. 30:18
    • There are three things too wonderful for the speaker.
    • There are four things the speaker does not know.
19. 30:19
    • The way of an eagle in the sky is one of them.
    • The way of a serpent upon a rock is one of them.
    • The way of a ship in the midst of the sea is one of them.
    • The way of a man with a young woman is one of them.
20. 30:20
    • The way of an adulterous woman is like these.
    • The adulterous woman eats.
    • The adulterous woman wipes her mouth.
    • The adulterous woman says she has done no wickedness.
21. 30:21
    • Under three things the earth trembles.
    • Under four things the earth cannot bear up.
22. 30:22
    • A servant who becomes king is one of them.
    • A fool who is filled with food is one of them.
23. 30:23
    • A hated or unloved woman when she is married is one of them.
    • A maidservant who dispossesses her mistress is one of them.
24. 30:24
    • There are four things that are little upon the earth.
    • Those four things are exceedingly wise.
25. 30:25
    • The ants are a people that are not strong.
    • The ants prepare their food in the summer.
26. 30:26
    • The rock badgers are a people that are not mighty.
    • The rock badgers make their houses in the rocks.
27. 30:27
    • The locusts have no king.
    • All the locusts go forth in ranks.
28. 30:28
    • The lizard can be taken hold of with the hands.
    • The verb is ambiguous between the creature seizing with its hands and the creature being caught by hands.
    • The lizard is found in kings' palaces.
29. 30:29
    • There are three things that are stately in their stride.
    • There are four things that are stately in their walk.
30. 30:30
    • The lion is mighty among beasts.
    • The lion does not turn back before anything.
31. 30:31
    • One of them is a creature described as girded in the loins, understood either as a strutting rooster or as a greyhound.
    • One of them is a he-goat.
    • One of them is a king.
    • The description of the king is ambiguous between a king against whom there is no rising up and a king with his army beside him.
32. 30:32
    • If the hearer has acted foolishly by exalting himself, he is told to put his hand on his mouth.
    • If the hearer has plotted evil, he is told to put his hand on his mouth.
33. 30:33
    • Pressing milk produces butter.
    • Pressing the nose produces blood.
    • Pressing anger produces strife.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

30:1

Agur son of Jakeh appears nowhere else in the Bible and nothing else is known about him. The word translated "prophecy" or "message" is Hebrew *massa*, meaning an oracle or a burden laid on a speaker; it is also the name of a north Arabian tribe, so the line can equally be read "Agur son of Jakeh of Massa," which would make him a foreigner. The following words are among the most uncertain in the Hebrew Bible: the consonants read as the names "Ithiel and Ucal" can also be divided to mean "I am weary, God, and worn out," which is why modern translations differ so sharply here.

30:2

The King James word "brutish" sounds like cruel today. In 1611 it meant like a beast, having no sense.

30:3

"The Holy One" translates a Hebrew plural, literally "holy ones," which is used elsewhere both as a title for God and for heavenly beings. The plural form is a normal Hebrew way of speaking of God with emphasis.

30:4

These are riddle questions of a kind common in ancient Near Eastern wisdom writing: they are phrased so that the hearer cannot supply a human name in answer. The last question, about a son's name, is the hardest part of the riddle, and its sense has been debated since antiquity.

30:5

"Pure" translates a Hebrew word taken from metalworking: metal refined in a furnace until the impurities are burned off. "Shield" is likewise a battlefield image, the small round shield a soldier carried on his arm.

30:6

Warnings against adding to or subtracting from a text were a standard formula attached to ancient documents (treaties, law codes, letters) to protect them from being altered by copyists or by people quoting them.

30:8

The Hebrew is literally "feed me the bread of my portion", the fixed ration allotted to a household servant or a soldier, neither a feast nor a scarcity.

30:9

"The LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew consonants that Jewish readers traditionally do not pronounce, substituting the word for "Lord" instead. Where you see "Lord" in ordinary type, a different Hebrew word, meaning master, lies behind it. "Dishonor the name" (King James "take the name in vain") refers to a specific act: swearing an oath by God's name and lying, here, a thief denying his theft under oath.

30:10

The "servant" is a slave, who had no standing to answer an accusation made to his owner. A curse in this world was not merely angry words but was thought to release real harm against its target, so the powerless man's curse is treated as a genuine danger to the informer.

30:11

Cursing a parent was not simply rudeness: in Israelite law it was a capital offense, ranked with striking a parent. Saying that someone does not "bless" a mother means they never speak a good word over her, the ordinary duty of a grown child toward a parent.

30:12

"Clean" and "filth" here use the vocabulary of ritual purity. Being clean or unclean was a formal status, not a matter of hygiene, and it was removed by prescribed washings. The saying turns that language against people who assume the status without ever undergoing the washing.

30:13

Pride here means thinking you are better than everyone else. Holding your head high showed it.

30:14

"Jaw teeth" are the back teeth, the molars. They are the ones used for grinding food.

30:15

The leech was a familiar blood-sucking creature, used in ancient medicine and proverbial for never letting go. Verses 15–31 are built as numbered sayings ("three things, yes four") a standard form in Hebrew and other Near Eastern wisdom writing. The rising count is a device for holding attention, and the weight of the saying usually falls on the last item in the list.

30:16

"The place of the dead" is Sheol, the underworld where the Hebrew Bible pictures all the dead as going, pictured here as a mouth that swallows and never fills. A childless womb is listed beside it because in this society children were a household's survival, labor force and inheritance, so childlessness was experienced as a permanent unfilled hunger.

30:17

A corpse left in the open for scavenging birds instead of being buried was the worst disgrace imaginable in this culture; proper burial in the family tomb was owed to every person. The punishment fits the crime by wording: the eye that mocked is the eye that is taken.

30:19

The Hebrew word translated "young woman" (*almah*) means a girl of marriageable age; it says nothing directly about whether she is married. The line is deliberately open: readers have taken "the way of a man with a young woman" as a fourth harmless wonder, and also as a first hint of the seduction described in the next verse.

30:20

Eating and wiping the mouth is a euphemism for sexual intercourse, and the joke is in the gesture: the meal leaves no trace once the mouth is wiped, so the woman can claim nothing happened.

30:21

"Disquieted" means shaken or badly upset.

30:22

"Servant" here means a slave. The four items in this list are all reversals of the fixed social order of the ancient world, in which a slave, a fool, an unwanted wife and a household maid each had a settled place beneath someone else.

30:23

"A woman nobody loves" translates a Hebrew word meaning "hated," which in marriage law was a technical term for the less-favored of a man's wives rather than a description of active hatred. The maid "taking her mistress's place" describes a slave woman who supplants the wife in the household, the situation of Hagar and Sarah in Genesis.

30:26

The rock badger, or hyrax, is a small thick-furred animal roughly the size of a rabbit that lives in colonies among cliffs and boulders in Israel and Sinai. The King James "cony" was an old English word for a rabbit, which is not the animal meant.

30:27

"By bands" means in groups and in ranks, like soldiers. A locust swarm could strip every green thing from a farmer's fields.

30:28

The Hebrew name of this creature occurs only here and its identity is uncertain; ancient and modern translators have guessed at a lizard or gecko, while the King James translators guessed a spider. Either way the point is a small creature easily caught by hand that nevertheless lives in royal buildings.

30:29

"Comely in going" means fine to watch as they walk.

30:31

The Hebrew of the first item is literally "girded of loins" and no one knows for certain what animal is meant: the King James guessed a greyhound, most modern translations a strutting rooster, and some a war horse. The last phrase is also obscure; it can mean a king with his troops around him, or a king no one dares rise up against.

30:32

Putting a hand over the mouth was a recognized gesture of enforced silence, made by someone who has been outargued, shamed, or is in the presence of a superior.

30:33

The Hebrew makes a pun that English cannot carry: the same word for pressing or squeezing is used three times, press milk and you get butter, press the nose and you get blood, press anger and you get a fight.