a word before we begin
You have heard this chapter your whole life, and I would wager you have never once been told it was written to you. You heard it at a women’s event, or on a Mother’s Day, or from a pulpit where it was handed to the women in the room as a standard to measure themselves against, and you sat there politely while somebody else’s homework was read aloud. Nobody mentioned that a king wrote it down. Nobody mentioned that what he was writing down was what his mother taught him about being a man.
Thirty-one verses in that chapter. The church preaches the last twenty-two at women and skips the first nine entirely, and those first nine are the ones addressed to a son. So an entire chapter of Scripture that was handed to a man, about how to be a man and what kind of woman to look for, has been quietly reassigned to the women’s ministry, and the men it was written for have never read it as theirs. We are going to take it back. Not to argue with anybody, and not to score a point against the women who have loved this chapter and drawn real good from it, but because it is yours, and you were never given it.
And I will tell you now, so you are not caught off guard, that some of it is going to land on you, because there is a word in here for the man who thinks headship means running his wife’s life, and there is a word for the man who has quietly checked out of his own house and is still collecting credit for showing up. I am not going to sand those down. But understand why they are here: not to run you into the ground, but because there is a post described in this chapter that is worth holding, a kind of strength worth having, and a household running well with a man at the head of it who is neither a tyrant nor a ghost. That is what is on the other side of the hard parts.
chapter one
the words of king lemuel
Start where the chapter starts, which almost nobody does.
There is the header on the whole chapter, and it changes everything that follows it. A king is writing. What he is writing down is the instruction his mother gave him, and he thought enough of it to set it in the permanent record of the Word of God. So this reaches us as a man’s testimony about what he was taught, one man handing another man what he was given, which is exactly how manhood has always been passed down when it has been passed down at all.1
And look at what she actually taught him, because it is not soft and it is not sentimental. She starts with his strength and where he spends it. Give not thy strength unto women, she says, nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings. That is the first thing out of her mouth to a young man with power in his hands: watch where you pour yourself out, because a man’s strength is finite and there are places that will drink it dry and leave him hollowed and useless to everyone depending on him. Not a rule against women. A warning about squandering.
Then she goes after his head. It is not for kings to drink wine, she tells him, nor for princes strong drink, lest they drink and forget the law and pervert the judgment of any of the afflicted. Read the reason she gives, because the reason is the whole point. She is not handing him a general prohibition and walking off. She is telling him that a man with other men depending on his judgment cannot afford a clouded head, because when his judgment goes crooked, it is not him who pays. It is the afflicted man standing in front of him waiting for a ruling. Responsibility raises the standard. The higher the post, the more a man owes the people underneath it.
And then she lands the whole thing on the one command that ties it together, and it is worth reading slowly, because it is the sharpest word in the chapter and it has been read to almost no man alive.
A man’s voice belongs to the people who have none.
Open thy mouth. Twice she says it, because she means it. A man’s voice belongs to the people who have none, the ones with no standing, no advocate, no way to be heard, the ones appointed to destruction because nobody with a seat in the gates ever said a word for them. That is what she wanted her son to do with the power she knew he would have. Guard your strength, keep your head clear, and then open your mouth for the man who cannot open his own. That is the first half of the chapter. It is a man’s instruction, given to a man, recorded by a man. And only after all of that is laid down does he turn and describe the woman worth having.
a woman of valour
is waiting for you
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sources & notes
- Proverbs 31:1–9, “the words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him,” on the first nine verses as maternal instruction to a son (a king) concerning strength, sobriety of judgment, and advocacy for the voiceless. Lemuel is otherwise unidentified in Scripture; the point drawn here is that verses 1–9 are addressed to a man. Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Proverbs 31.
- W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Old Testament section), and standard Hebrew lexicons, on chayil: strength, might, valour, force; used of armies and “mighty men of valour” (e.g. Judges 6:12, of Gideon; 1 Samuel 16:18) and of the “virtuous” woman of Proverbs 31:10, literally an eshet chayil, a woman of valour. The same word describes Ruth (Ruth 3:11).
- Ruth 4:1–11 (Boaz settling a legal matter at the gate), with Deuteronomy 21:19; 22:15; and Proverbs 31:23, on the city gate (Hebrew sha’ar) as the seat of civic, legal, and judicial affairs where elders sat and judgment was rendered. Cf. J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, on Ruth 4.
- Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (1966), and Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (Yale University Press, 1977), on the pre-industrial household as a single productive economy and the industrial revolution’s severing of workplace from home, with the “separate spheres” ideology following after. The observation that the man’s work left the home first is the author’s framing of that economic history.
- Titus 2:4–5, on older women teaching younger women to be “keepers at home” (Greek oikourgos / oikouros): the sense is the working management of a household, not confinement to it; cf. 1 Timothy 5:14 (oikodespotein, “to guide the house”). See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words, entry “Keeper (at home).” The Proverbs 31 woman’s trade and land-dealing is offered as the biblical model of such household-keeping.
- W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, entry “Fear,” on yirah as reverent awe of God; with Proverbs 1:7 (“the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge”) and 9:10, which frame the whole book and are answered by 31:30 (“a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised”), the interpretive key to the acrostic poem. Cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Proverbs 31:30.