Proverbs 20 · a question people ask
"A righteous man walks in integrity" (20:7), and then, "Who can say, “I have made my heart pure. I am clean and without sin”?" (20:9). Do these two sayings pull against each other?
The chapter holds both, and each says its own thing. 20:7 speaks of how a man walks: "A righteous man walks in integrity. Blessed are his children after him" (20:7). 20:9 asks who can say of his own heart, "I have made my heart pure" (20:9). In Hebrew I have made … pure is one word, from zakhah, which Brown-Driver-Briggs gives as "be clear, clean, pure, alw. in a moral sense", and for the form used here, "make or keep clean, pure" (tap pure). Proverbs says something close in another saying: "All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the motives" (Proverbs 16:2). Other books say it plainly: "for there is no man who doesn’t sin" (1 Kings 8:46), and "for in your sight no man living is righteous" (Psalm 143:2). And a psalm asks God for a clean heart: "Create in me a clean heart, O God" (Psalm 51:10), where clean is tahor, which Strong's gives as "from 2891", the verb of 20:9's I am clean. The book doesn't say how 20:7 and 20:9 fit together, and these notes don't either.
The verses
“A righteous man walks in integrity. Blessed are his children after him.”
“Who can say, “I have made my heart pure. I am clean and without sin”?”
“All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but the LORD weighs the motives.”
“If they sin against you (for there is no man who doesn’t sin), and you are angry with them and deliver them to the enemy, so that they carry them away captive to the land of the enemy, far off or near;”