Proverbs 10 Bible study: Love covers all wrongs

The chapter opens with a heading: "The proverbs of Solomon" (10:1) (tap proverbs). In Hebrew they are the book's own first two words, mishlei Shelomoh (Proverbs 1:1). Then the way of speaking changes. Through chapter 9 the teaching came in longer talks, many of them to "My son", and Wisdom spoke too (Proverbs 1:8, 1:20). Here every verse is a saying of its own, and most come in two halves set against each other: in the WEB, 26 of the chapter's 32 verses turn on but. Here is what almost everyone misses: the first saying is still about a son, a father and a mother. "A wise son makes a glad father; but a foolish son brings grief to his mother" (10:1). The first talk to "My son" named the same three: "My son, listen to your father’s instruction, and don’t forsake your mother’s teaching" (Proverbs 1:8). Four verses later a son comes again: "He who gathers in summer is a wise son, but he who sleeps during the harvest is a son who causes shame" (10:5). In Hebrew the wise of 10:5 is another word from the wise of 10:1.

Proverbs 10:7→leads toMatthew 26:13

"The memory of the righteous is blessed" (Proverbs 10:7). At Bethany a woman poured very expensive ointment on Jesus's head as he sat at the table (Matthew 26:6-7). Jesus said, "She has done a good work for me" (Matthew 26:10), and "Most certainly I tell you, wherever this Good News is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be spoken of as a memorial of her" (Matthew 26:13). Jesus doesn't cite Proverbs, so setting the two together is a reading. It rests on a shared subject, not only on a shared word: a person remembered well. In Proverbs 10:7 it is the righteous, whose memory is blessed; in Matthew 26 it is a woman whose deed Jesus called good and said would be told. Proverbs 10:7 names no one, and Matthew 26 doesn't call the woman righteous; it gives Jesus's words that what she did was good and would be told. One reading hears in Jesus's words what Proverbs 10:7 says, that the memory of the righteous is blessed. Another hears his words as bound to the Good News and to his own burial, "she did it to prepare me for burial" (Matthew 26:12): a word about his death, not a saying about how anyone is remembered.

צַדִּיקtsaddiqsay tsad-DEEK

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "just, righteous". Strong's: "just". The chapter has it in 13 verses, from "The LORD will not allow the soul of the righteous to go hungry" (10:3) to "The lips of the righteous know what is acceptable" (10:32). In 10:24 and 10:28 it is plural. Proverbs has it 66 times in Hebrew, more than any other book of the Hebrew Bible. The righteousness of 10:2 is another word, tsedaqah.