Faithful Steward Ministries and FSM Women's Outreach

Parts of Proverbs puzzle people. The book is unusual. The rest of the Bible contains poetry, laws, histories, prophecies, and songs, and each of these different styles of writing will take up large sections of verses, chapters, and whole books. In the Proverbs, however, we find short, pithy statements, usually within the confines of a single sentence. Each statement is like a small, bite-sized bit of truth. Because of this, they are not always clear to people. They are the opposite of something like a legal contract, which will be carefully hedged with restrictions and qualifications. These short, crisp statements can just hang there, as it were, with no real explanation or qualification in the immediately preceding or succeeding verses.

Hence, this book…