Prov 22:17:
Bend your ear and hear the
words of the wise. Here begins a formal exordium, running to verse 21, that
marks the inception of a new collection of proverbs that comprises two
subunits, 22:22–23:11 and 23:12–24:22. The first of these sub-units, as most
scholars for nearly a century have agreed, is an adaptation of an Egyptian
Wisdom text, the Instruction of Amenemope, and thus bears witness to the
international circulation of Wisdom literature. Fifteen of its twenty-four
verses have notable parallels in Amenemope, and some of the sequencing of the proverbs
is the same. In all likelihood, the Egyptian text was first translated into
Aramaic, perhaps in the seventh century B.C.E., by which time Aramaic had
become a diplomatic lingua franca in the Near East. Elite circles in Israel at
this point certainly knew Aramaic, and so an adaptation from the Aramaic to
Hebrew would have been perfectly likely. It is notable that the Hebrew of this
section incorporates a number of Aramaic usages. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew
Bible, 3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:420)
Prov 22:27:
why should your bedding be
taken from under you. As the law in Exodus 22:25–26 makes clear, the poor
man’s bedding was the cloak in which he wrapped himself for sleep—hence one is
forbidden to take it away from him at night in pawn for a debt. A letter on
behalf of a laborer, found at Yavneh Yam, and dating from the seventh century
B.C.E., complains about the deprivation of the cloak for debt. The Hebrew seems
to say “why should he take your bedding,” but the third-person masculine
singular is often used as the equivalent of a passive and thus is translated
here as a passive. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, 3 vols. [New York:
W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 3:421)
