14:1 Every wise woman 1 builds 2 her household, 3
but a foolish woman tears it down with her own hands.
14:17 A person who has a quick temper 4 does foolish things,
and a person with crafty schemes 5 is hated. 6
17:25 A foolish child is a grief 7 to his father,
and bitterness to the mother who bore him. 8
19:13 A foolish child 9 is the ruin of his father,
and a contentious wife 10 is like 11 a constant dripping. 12
1 tn Heb “wise ones of women.” The construct phrase חַכְמוֹת נָשִׁים (khakhmot nashim) features a wholistic genitive: “wise women.” The plural functions in a distributive sense: “every wise woman.” The contrast is between wise and foolish women (e.g., Prov 7:10-23; 31:10-31).
2 tn The perfect tense verb in the first colon functions in a gnomic sense, while the imperfect tense in the second colon is a habitual imperfect.
3 tn Heb “house.” This term functions as a synecdoche of container (= house) for contents (= household, family).
4 sn The proverb discusses two character traits that are distasteful to others – the quick tempered person (“short of anger” or impatient) and the crafty person (“man of devices”). C. H. Toy thinks that the proverb is antithetical and renders it “but a wise man endures” (Proverbs [ICC], 292). In other words, the quick-tempered person acts foolishly and loses people’s respect, but the wise man does not.
5 tn Heb “a man of devices.”
6 tc The LXX reads “endures” (from נָשָׂא, nasa’) rather than “is hated” (from שָׂנֵא, sane’). This change seems to have arisen on the assumption that a contrast was needed. It has: “a man of thought endures.” Other versions take מְזִמּוֹת (mÿzimmot) in a good sense; but antithetical parallelism is unwarranted here.
7 sn The Hebrew noun means “vexation, anger, grief.”
8 tn Heb “to the one who bore him.” Because the participle is feminine singular in Hebrew, this has been translated as “the mother who bore him.”
sn The proverb is similar to v. 21, 10:1, and 15:20.
9 tn Heb “a foolish son” (so KJV, NAB, NIV, CEV); NRSV “a stupid child.”
10 tn Heb “the contentions of a wife” (so KJV, NASB); NAB “the nagging of a wife.” The genitive could be interpreted (1) as genitive of source or subjective genitive – she is quarreling; or (2) it could be a genitive of specification, making the word “contentions” a modifier, as in the present translation.
11 tn Heb “is a constant dripping.” The term “like” does not appear in the Hebrew but is supplied in the translation for the sake of clarity. The metaphor pictures water dropping (perhaps rain through the roof, cf. NRSV, CEV) in a continuous flow: It is annoying and irritating (e.g., Prov 27:15-16).
12 tc The LXX makes this moralistic statement for 13b: “vows paid out of hire of a harlot are not pure.” It is not based on the MT and attempts to reconstruct a text using this have been unsuccessful.