Proverbs 27 Bible study: Iron sharpens iron

The chapter opens with two sayings side by side. "Don’t boast about tomorrow; for you don’t know what a day may bring" (27:1). "Let another man praise you, and not your own mouth; a stranger, and not your own lips" (27:2). Here is what almost everyone misses: in Hebrew boast and praise are one verb, halal (tap praise). Brown-Driver-Briggs gives it, in the form of 27:1, as "glory, boast", and in the form of 27:2 as "praise". The first saying speaks of boasting about a day no one knows yet; the second says where praise should come from: another man's mouth, not your own. Another man and a stranger in 27:2 are two Hebrew words, zar and nokhri, and they come as a pair again in 27:13, where the WEB gives them as a stranger and a wayward woman. Near the end of the chapter the same root comes back: "The crucible is for silver, and the furnace for gold; but man is refined by his praise" (27:21) (tap crucible). There praise is mahalal, a noun Strong's gives as "from 1984", the number of halal, and Brown-Driver-Briggs lists it only in this verse. The book's last chapter has 27:2's verb again: "Let her works praise her in the gates!" (Proverbs 31:31).

רֵעַreasay RE-a

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "friend, companion, fellow". Strong's: "an associate (more or less close)". "Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart; so does earnest counsel from a man’s friend" (27:9). It comes twice in "Don’t forsake your friend and your father’s friend" (27:10), and again in "so a man sharpens his friend’s countenance" (27:17). In 27:14 the WEB gives it as neighbor: "He who blesses his neighbor with a loud voice early in the morning, it will be taken as a curse by him" (27:14). That is five times in this chapter, more than in any other chapter of Proverbs, which has it 33 times in Hebrew. The friend of 27:6 is another word, ohev (tap friend there), and so is the neighbor of 27:10's last line, shakhen.