A righteous son. The
Masoretic Text reads ken tsedaqah, “thus righteousness,” which does not
make much sense and produces a poor parallelism with the second verset in a
series of proverbs where the parallelism is usually neat, even pat. This
translation adopts a reading shown in some Hebrew manuscripts as well as in the
Septuagint and Syriac: ben tsedaqah (literally, “son of righteousness”).
(Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2019], 3:388)
