Proverbs 9 Bible study: Two tables

The chapter sets two women side by side. First, "Wisdom has built her house. She has carved out her seven pillars" (9:1) (tap Wisdom). She gets everything ready: "She has prepared her meat. She has mixed her wine. She has also set her table" (9:2). Then "She has sent out her maidens. She cries from the highest places of the city" (9:3). At the end of the chapter comes the other: "The foolish woman is loud, undisciplined, and knows nothing" (9:13) (tap foolish). "She sits at the door of her house, on a seat in the high places of the city" (9:14). In Hebrew the high places of the city (9:14) are two words that are also in 9:3's the highest places of the city, where one more word stands before them. Here is what almost everyone misses: the two women call out the very same words, to the very same people. Wisdom: "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!" (9:4). The foolish woman: "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here" (9:16) (tap simple). And both verses go on, "As for him who is void of understanding, she says to him" (9:4, 9:16). What is different is what each offers and where it leads. Wisdom offers bread and the wine she has mixed (9:5), and says, "Leave your simple ways, and live" (9:6). The foolish woman offers water and food: "Stolen water is sweet. Food eaten in secret is pleasant" (9:17). And the chapter's last words are about her guests: "But he doesn’t know that the departed spirits are there, that her guests are in the depths of Sheol" (9:18).

Proverbs 9:8→leads toMatthew 7:6

Proverbs 9 says, "One who corrects a mocker invites insult" (Proverbs 9:7), and "Don’t reprove a scoffer, lest he hate you. Reprove a wise person, and he will love you" (Proverbs 9:8). In the teaching he gave on the mountain (Matthew 5:1-2, 7:28), right after speaking of how to "remove the speck out of your brother’s eye" (Matthew 7:5), Jesus said, "Don’t give that which is holy to the dogs, neither throw your pearls before the pigs, lest perhaps they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces" (Matthew 7:6). Jesus doesn't cite Proverbs, so setting the two together is a reading. It rests on a shared subject, not a shared word: in both, something good offered to some who won't receive it brings harm back on the one who offers it ("lest he hate you", Proverbs 9:8; "turn and tear you to pieces", Matthew 7:6). Jesus doesn't say whom he means by the dogs and the pigs, and this line names no one. Christians read Matthew 7:6 in more than one way. One reading hears it with the verses just before it, about correcting a brother (Matthew 7:3-5), and so close to what Proverbs 9:7-8 says. Another hears "that which is holy" and "your pearls" as something other than correction (Jesus doesn't say what they are), and so finds the likeness to Proverbs 9 looser. These notes pick neither.

פֶּתִיpetisay PE-tee

Brown-Driver-Briggs: "simple". Strong's: "silly (i.e. seducible)". It is who both women call: Wisdom, "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!" (9:4), and the foolish woman, "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here" (9:16). In "Leave your simple ways, and live" (9:6), the WEB's simple ways is the same word in the plural, as in you simple ones (1:22). Wisdom called the same people in chapter 1: "How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity?" (Proverbs 1:22). Proverbs has this Strong's number 15 times in Hebrew (counting 1:22's simplicity, which Brown-Driver-Briggs lists as a noun of its own), and chapter 9 three times.