Some commentaries are excellent reference works because they gather information reliably. Others are especially useful for preaching, Hebrew grammar, historical background, literary structure, or biblical theology. When I describe a commentary as one of the most insightful, however, I am looking for something more specific: the best balance of originality and usefulness, where originality actually helps me understand Proverbs better rather than merely offering something unusual.

By originality I do not mean novelty for its own sake. An elaborate literary structure, surprising translation, unconventional historical reconstruction, or ingenious theological connection is not automatically valuable simply because few others have proposed it. The commentaries I value most are those that repeatedly notice something other readers miss, make a connection that clarifies the text, explain difficult Hebrew more convincingly, or provide a conceptual framework that continues to improve my reading beyond the particular passage being discussed.

Nor does a high ranking mean that I agree with every conclusion. Fox, Ansberry, Waltke, Overland, and Clifford operate with significantly different assumptions about literary coherence, theology, composition, and the relationship between individual sayings and the final form of Proverbs. Their disagreement is actually part of their usefulness, because reading them together provides checks against both atomistic interpretation and overconstructed literary schemes.

Since the previous version of this post, I have also worked through several important additional volumes: John Hartley’s New Beacon commentary, Roland Murphy’s form-critical treatment in The Wisdom Literature, Katharine Dell’s The Theology of the Book of Proverbs, Sergio Rotasperti’s Metaphors in Proverbs, Alexander Kirk’s Agur’s Wisdom and the Coherence of Proverbs 30, and Joel Atwood’s Semantics and “Spirit”. Most are not conventional continuous commentaries, so I have not artificially inserted them into a ranking designed primarily for full commentaries. I have instead added a substantial specialist section after the core list, because several of them materially change how I now read particular dimensions of Proverbs.

1. Michael V. Fox — Proverbs 1–9 and Proverbs 10–31 — Anchor Bible / Anchor Yale Bible

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Fox remains my first choice for the best overall balance of originality and usefulness in Proverbs. His distinctive strength is the combination of meticulous Hebrew philology, textual criticism, ancient Near Eastern comparison, literary sensitivity, and unusually independent judgment, and these elements continually reinforce one another rather than operating as separate technical exercises. When translations diverge, the Masoretic Text is difficult, the Septuagint preserves a significantly different reading, or interpreters have built an elaborate argument on an uncertain Hebrew construction, Fox is usually one of the first scholars I want to consult.

His methodological restraint is almost as important as his philological expertise. Fox recognises genuine thematic sequences, lexical links, deliberate juxtapositions, and editorial relationships among neighbouring sayings, but he does not begin with the assumption that every run of proverbs in chapters 10–29 must form an intricately constructed poem. That makes him particularly valuable as a control when other commentators discover chiasms, inclusios, thematic progressions, or larger literary units whose existence depends upon increasingly faint verbal correspondences. Proverbs readily rewards close literary reading, but it is also unusually vulnerable to structures that become convincing mainly because the interpreter has already decided that a structure must be there.

Fox is equally rewarding in Proverbs 1–9, where the literary situation is quite different from the sentence collections that follow. His treatment of parental instruction, Woman Wisdom, the strange woman, moral education, competing invitations, and the wider ancient instructional tradition consistently clarifies the text without reducing its rhetoric to a single theological scheme. He is particularly good at distinguishing what the text clearly establishes from theological conclusions that may be legitimate within a later canonical framework but should not simply be imported into the original discourse.

My principal reservation remains theological rather than exegetical. Fox sometimes distinguishes the experiential dimensions of wisdom from explicitly Yahwistic theology more sharply than I would, and readers seeking a thick Christian account of Woman Wisdom, creation, fear of the LORD, or canonical fulfilment will want Waltke, Ansberry, Dell, or another theological interpreter beside him. Yet precisely because Fox rarely allows a theological synthesis to decide a difficult exegetical question in advance, he remains the commentary I most trust to tell me where the textual evidence is strong, where it is uncertain, and where an attractive interpretation may be asking the Hebrew to bear more weight than it can.

2. Christopher B. Ansberry — Proverbs — Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Ansberry remains the most illuminating recent commentary for understanding what Proverbs is trying to do to its readers. His central interpretive strength is the conviction that Proverbs aims at character formation rather than merely transferring practical information: wisdom educates perception, desire, emotion, imagination, habit, judgment, and ultimately identity. That framework allows subjects as different as money, work, speech, sexuality, anger, friendship, justice, leadership, and family to belong to one coherent educational project instead of becoming independent categories in an ancient self-help manual.

His use of virtue theory and conceptual metaphor is especially productive. Paths, boundaries, rival ways, competing women, houses, meals, movement, accounting, and other recurring images do not simply decorate propositions that could have been communicated equally well in abstract prose; they provide the imaginative categories through which the learner comes to perceive moral reality. This gives Ansberry’s literary observations theological and pedagogical significance, because Proverbs becomes a book that teaches people how to see before it teaches them how to choose.

Ansberry’s treatment of the fear of the LORD is also one of the commentary’s strongest features. Fear is not merely the elementary first lesson of a wisdom curriculum that advanced students eventually outgrow, but the continuing relational and epistemological posture within which genuine wisdom remains possible. Human reason, observation, experience, and judgment are valuable precisely because they operate within creaturely limits and in relationship to the God whose world the sage is attempting to understand.

I remain somewhat cautious about making every element of the proposed pedagogical progression across Proverbs depend upon a highly specific curricular sequence, and the conceptual vocabulary of virtue formation can occasionally become more schematic than the text itself. Nevertheless, Ansberry succeeds in offering a genuinely integrative reading without requiring every neighbouring proverb to form a carefully engineered literary unit. If Fox is the commentary I most often trust when deciding exactly what a difficult text means, Ansberry may be the commentary that best explains why the book has arranged all these texts into an education in wisdom.

3. Bruce K. Waltke — The Book of Proverbs, 2 vols. — New International Commentary on the Old Testament

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Waltke remains the most substantial technical evangelical commentary on Proverbs and one of the richest repositories of detailed observations anywhere in the field. Hebrew syntax, semantics, word order, parallelism, sound patterns, catchwords, literary structure, ancient background, theology, and canonical interpretation are brought together with extraordinary energy. Even where I eventually reject one of Waltke’s literary proposals, he frequently makes me notice something in the Hebrew that I would otherwise have passed over.

One of his most fruitful methodological convictions is that editors can themselves function as authors. A proverb may have circulated independently before being incorporated into a collection, but placement beside another saying can create new resonances, contrasts, qualifications, or developments, so final location matters for interpretation. This basic intuition has become increasingly important across Proverbs studies, and it offers a valuable alternative both to treating Proverbs 10–29 as essentially random and to assuming that only the hypothetical original setting of a saying determines its meaning.

Waltke is also exceptionally strong when individual exegesis must be brought into a theological account of the book. The fear of Yahweh, creation, righteousness, moral order, speech, sexuality, family, wealth, poverty, kingship, justice, humility, and life and death are integrated into a broad theology of wisdom in which practical conduct is inseparable from relationship with God. This is where Waltke is an especially fruitful companion to Fox: Fox is often more cautious about theological expansion, while Waltke repeatedly asks how a saying contributes to the scriptural and theological world in which Christian readers receive Proverbs.

The cost of Waltke’s literary attentiveness is occasional structural overconfidence. Repeated vocabulary, thematic resemblance, or positional symmetry may suggest an editorial relationship without necessarily establishing the larger composition he reconstructs, and in these cases Fox provides a valuable methodological brake. Even so, the sheer number of exegetically productive observations means that Waltke continues to reward repeated consultation, and I cannot imagine doing serious evangelical work on Proverbs without him.

4. Paul Overland — Proverbs — Apollos Old Testament Commentary

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Overland is one of the commentaries that most significantly changed my assessment of Proverbs because he presses the question of literary coherence considerably further than most earlier commentators. He works simultaneously at several levels: the individual saying, the relationship among neighbouring sayings, larger poems or instructional units, and finally a proposed pedagogical progression through the whole book. That multilevel approach is ambitious, but it repeatedly generates observations that deserve attention even when the larger structural proposal remains debatable.

His handling of difficult Hebrew is particularly refreshing. Where a phrase is awkward, unexpected, or syntactically resistant, Overland is often reluctant to emend immediately and instead asks whether the sage may have deliberately produced something arresting that forces the pupil to stop, reconsider, and solve an interpretive problem. Proverbs is, after all, a literature designed to cultivate discernment, and a text that occasionally makes the student work for understanding may be fulfilling rather than frustrating its educational purpose.

The boldest part of Overland’s interpretation is his understanding of Proverbs as a developing wisdom curriculum. Proverbs 1–9 addresses a prospective pupil who must be persuaded to embrace wisdom; Proverbs 10–24 increasingly trains the apprentice in the realities of character, security, wealth, relationships, power, satisfaction, and flourishing; Proverbs 25–29 moves toward the mature sage operating more publicly and particularly within royal contexts; and Proverbs 30–31 brings the reader back to humility, limits, leadership, reverence, and embodied wisdom. The result is a remarkably dynamic account of why the final order of the book might matter.

My reservation is that the interpretive system can become difficult to falsify. If an apparent discontinuity is itself treated as an educational riddle whose hidden coherence must be discovered, the absence of obvious structure can occasionally become evidence for deeper structure rather than evidence against it. I therefore find some of Overland’s individual literary units much more convincing than others, but his best arguments are sufficiently original and useful that anyone seriously interested in the final shape of Proverbs should engage them.

5. Richard J. Clifford — Proverbs — Old Testament Library

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5)

Clifford remains remarkable for the amount of genuinely illuminating interpretation compressed into a comparatively modest volume. His most important contribution is his understanding of creative anthologizing: the collectors of Proverbs are not merely archivists preserving inherited sayings but literary agents whose selection and juxtaposition can generate new meanings. This provides a persuasive middle position between isolating every proverb from its neighbours and reconstructing elaborate compositional architectures whose evidence is sometimes tenuous.

His rhetorical sensitivity is especially strong in Proverbs 1–9. Woman Wisdom, violent companions, the strange woman, parental instruction, houses, paths, meals, and competing invitations together construct a moral world in which the young learner is not simply choosing among isolated actions but choosing what kind of life and community to inhabit. Wisdom consequently becomes simultaneously intellectual, ethical, relational, and theological, and Clifford often expresses this larger point without allowing it to obscure the immediate rhetorical situation.

Clifford is equally good where proverbial wisdom requires contextual discrimination rather than rule application. Proverbs 26:4–5 is an obvious example: answering a fool and refusing to answer a fool are both potentially wise because the competent sage must recognise which danger dominates the particular situation. The juxtaposition becomes almost a miniature hermeneutic of Proverbs itself, demonstrating that possession of wise sentences is not identical with possession of wisdom.

His treatment of Proverbs 31 is another example of constructive final-form interpretation. The capable woman remains an idealised human woman rather than simply an allegory of Woman Wisdom, yet her location at the conclusion of the book allows qualities associated with wisdom throughout Proverbs to become embodied in an ordinary human life and household. I remain less convinced by some of Clifford’s redactional reconstructions than by his rhetorical and literary readings, but the latter are so consistently fruitful that this concise commentary remains firmly within the top group.

Newly Added Specialist Works That Materially Deepen the Top Five

The newly examined books confirm an important point about Proverbs: some of the most valuable interpretive insights now come from works that are not conventional verse-by-verse commentaries. I would not replace the five commentaries above with these specialised studies, because their aims and coverage are different, but several add dimensions that the major commentaries cannot explore at comparable depth. For Commentary Compass readers who want to know not merely which commentary to own but where the most rewarding insights are found, these volumes deserve substantial attention.

Katharine J. Dell — The Theology of the Book of Proverbs

Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5) — Most Insightful Theological Companion

Dell is the most important new addition to this post and the only newly supplied volume I would rate at a full five stars for the specific criterion of originality balanced by usefulness. Her central contribution is to challenge the longstanding tendency to treat Proverbs as one of the least theological books of the Old Testament because it contains large quantities of apparently ordinary advice and comparatively fewer explicit references to God than prophetic, legal, or liturgical texts. Dell argues instead that the book presupposes a theological worldview throughout, particularly through its understanding of God as Creator, the fear of the LORD, moral order, Woman Wisdom, and divine involvement in human affairs.

Her treatment of creation is especially illuminating. Proverbs can ground concern for the poor in the fact that rich and poor share the same Maker, speak of God as the one who creates eyes and ears, and locate Wisdom in relation to the ordering of creation itself. Ethics therefore does not operate in a theological vacuum: truthful commerce, treatment of the vulnerable, human equality, economic conduct, and social responsibility belong to the created order and are accountable to its Creator.

Dell is also unusually useful because she refuses to isolate theological synthesis from literary and historical questions. She discusses the different collections, the long scholarly debate over whether wisdom was originally secular and only later “Yahwised,” Egyptian influence, character formation, fear of the LORD, reward and retribution, and the relationship of Proverbs to Ecclesiastes, Genesis, Deuteronomy, wisdom psalms, Ben Sira, Qumran, and subsequent Christian interpretation. The result is not a systematic theology imposed on Proverbs but an attempt to understand what theological vision emerges when the different parts of the book are allowed to speak together.

I would still begin close exegesis with Fox, Ansberry, Waltke, Overland, or Clifford, because Dell is not trying to solve every textual or philological difficulty. Yet once those details are established, Dell is now one of the books I most want beside them when asking what kind of theological world the individual sayings collectively inhabit. For Commentary Compass’s particular interest in insights that materially improve future reading, this is a genuine five-star addition.

Alexander T. Kirk — Agur’s Wisdom and the Coherence of Proverbs 30

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5 overall; exceptionally insightful for Proverbs 30)

Kirk provides perhaps the most strikingly original reading among the newly added books, but its deliberate restriction to a single chapter keeps it outside the main whole-book ranking. Proverbs 30 has often been treated as a difficult appendix in which Agur’s enigmatic opening, the prayer of verses 7–9, miscellaneous short sayings, numerical patterns, animals, and apparently unrelated observations sit together without much more than editorial proximity. Kirk challenges that consensus by asking whether voice, tone, imagery, and theme provide a deeper form of coherence than formal sequence alone.

His central proposal is that Agur’s material consistently attacks pride and greed while commending humility and contentment. Agur begins by diminishing his own intellectual pretensions before the God whose knowledge encompasses creation, moves through a prayer that refuses both destitution and self-sufficient abundance, and then presents a succession of strange, memorable, and frequently animal-filled observations in which insatiability, arrogance, predation, smallness, restraint, and appropriate limitation repeatedly surface. Kirk therefore reads the later numerical sayings not as unrelated material collected because of their external form but as part of the same ethical and theological world established earlier in the chapter.

Even more illuminating is his attention to humour and satire. A proverb need not append “therefore do not be proud” if its imagery has already made pride ridiculous, grotesque, disgusting, or absurd, and Kirk shows how leeches, scavenging birds, animals, social reversals, exaggerated appetite, witty juxtaposition, and verbal play create precisely that kind of affective instruction. Humour therefore becomes ethically serious because it changes how the audience feels about the behaviour being portrayed.

Not every proposed connection is equally demonstrable, and the search for coherence always carries some danger of making the reader’s thematic synthesis more unified than the anthology itself. Yet Kirk makes it considerably harder to return to the older judgment that Proverbs 30 is simply miscellaneous. For anyone teaching, preaching, or writing on Agur, this is now one of the first specialist studies I would consult.

Sergio Rotasperti — Metaphors in Proverbs: Decoding the Language of Metaphor in the Book of Proverbs

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Rotasperti makes a major contribution by treating metaphor as a mode of wisdom rather than merely attractive packaging around an independently expressible proposition. Proverbs continually thinks through bodies, roads, houses, city walls, wells, fortresses, weather, agricultural products, animals, food, precious materials, and ordinary objects, and these images recruit sensory and emotional experience into the process of moral understanding. A breached city, healing tongue, slippery foot, golden ring on a pig, biting snake, roaring lion, secure hyrax, or dog returning to vomit does more than illustrate an abstract lesson; the image helps create the reader’s response to what is being taught.

Rotasperti’s organisation around four major semantic fields—the body, urban life, nature, and animals—is particularly useful because it reveals patterns that disappear when metaphors are examined only one proverb at a time. Bodily imagery often converts visible or physical realities into descriptions of speech, emotion, character, and social behaviour; urban structures help conceptualise security, vulnerability, conflict, and relationships; nature supplies both beauty and danger; and animals allow the sages to portray human conduct through instinctive reactions of admiration, amusement, fear, or disgust. Wisdom consequently emerges as deeply embodied and observational.

His insistence upon cultural and lexical context is equally important. Modern readers may understand the broad intention of an image while missing associations that made its original rhetoric effective, and Rotasperti repeatedly reconstructs the social or natural world required to appreciate the metaphor’s force. At the same time, he allows ambiguity and surprise to remain where the Hebrew image resists complete explanation, which is an important safeguard against turning poetic wisdom into a set of flat paraphrases.

The book is necessarily selective and its theoretical treatment can sometimes take longer than the interpretive payoff seems to require. Nevertheless, after reading Rotasperti it becomes much harder to treat metaphor as something one can decode once and then discard. He reinforces one of Ansberry’s strongest insights from an entirely different methodological direction: Proverbs forms moral perception partly by giving readers images through which to see.

Roland E. Murphy — The Wisdom Literature — Forms of the Old Testament Literature

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Murphy’s FOTL volume is very different from his later Word Biblical Commentary and should not be judged as though it were attempting the same task. Its disciplined focus is form-critical: literary units are examined according to structure, genre, setting, and intention, and Proverbs therefore appears as an unusually varied educational literature employing sayings, commands, prohibitions, instructions, speeches, numerical forms, poems, and other rhetorical strategies. The value of the approach is that it asks not only what a statement says but what kind of speech act it is and how that form attempts to influence a hearer.

Murphy is especially helpful in distinguishing observational sayings from more overtly didactic forms. A proverb may describe reality and require the hearer to infer the behavioural implication, while an instruction, command, prohibition, or motive clause can press the desired response far more explicitly. These forms need not come from wholly different social worlds; they can be alternative pedagogical instruments used within the same broad task of forming judgment and conduct.

His larger observation about literary setting remains especially valuable despite the age of the volume. Individual sayings may once have circulated orally within families, courtly instruction, scribal education, or other social environments, but once they have been collected into Proverbs the book itself becomes their new setting. Proverbs 1–9 therefore changes how the reader encounters the collections beginning in chapter 10, because inherited observations have become material within an intentional programme of teaching.

Form criticism has rightly been criticised when hypothetical reconstructions of ancient settings become more certain than the textual evidence permits, and subsequent work by Fox, Clifford, Ansberry, Overland, and others has expanded the questions that must be asked. Yet Murphy at his best remains a useful methodological corrective: before extracting “the principle” from a proverb, one should ask what literary form is addressing us, how it persuades, and what sort of response that form expects.

Joel A. J. Atwood — Semantics and “Spirit”: rûaḥ and Humanity in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)

Atwood’s study is narrower than any of the major commentaries, but within its lexical field it is unusually original. His target is the Hebrew rûaḥ, a word that English versions may render as spirit, breath, disposition, temper, inner self, or through still other terms, thereby creating the impression that ancient Hebrew employs a series of distinct meanings where a more complex conceptual network may actually be operating. Drawing on cognitive linguistics, Atwood asks how bodily breath, interiority, speech, volition, emotional experience, action, and metaphorical spatial relationships can remain connected without collapsing them into one simplistic definition.

The Proverbs material is particularly revealing because rûaḥ repeatedly becomes associated with the governable inner person. Breath can provide conceptual access to speech and to the self that speaks; the internal person can be restrained or left uncontrolled; patience and impatience can be imagined through spatial or bodily patterns; brokenness can be expressed as damage to the rûaḥ; and pride and humility can be mapped vertically through rising and lowering. These relationships show why a translation such as “spirit” can be formally correct yet still fail to communicate the cognitive richness of the Hebrew.

His reading of pride and humility in Proverbs 16:18–19 and 29:23 is especially suggestive. Social and moral status are mapped onto vertical space so that self-exaltation carries within the metaphor the possibility of falling, while humility occupies a lower position from which elevation must come from outside the self. The linguistic image therefore reinforces a fundamental theological intuition in Proverbs: the person who tries to secure status through self-exaltation misunderstands both the self and the world within which honour is finally given.

Atwood is far too specialised to replace a normal commentary, and readers uninterested in cognitive semantics may find the methodological scaffolding demanding. Yet the work demonstrates why lexical study can become theological anthropology: the person Proverbs seeks to form is embodied, speaking, desiring, emotionally responsive, socially situated, and in need of self-government. For passages involving rûaḥ, it adds a dimension that no general commentary can explore comparably.

John E. Hartley — Proverbs — New Beacon Bible Commentary

Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5) — Strong, but just outside the core Most Insightful list

Hartley is the only newly supplied work that is a conventional full commentary, and it is a very good one. Its organisation around “Behind the Text,” “In the Text,” and “From the Text” allows literary and historical background, verse-level exegesis, and theological or ethical appropriation to remain distinguishable without becoming disconnected. Hartley also brings decades of teaching Proverbs to the commentary, and that experience shows particularly in the clarity with which he identifies recurring themes and helps readers negotiate the long sequences of short sayings.

His treatment of Hebrew poetry is consistently useful. Rather than discussing parallelism only in the introduction and then forgetting it, Hartley regularly identifies how the second line affirms, opposes, or advances the first and pays attention to chiasm, implied elements, sound play, metaphor, and other features that affect interpretation. This is especially valuable in the sentence collections, where the reader can otherwise move so rapidly from verse to verse that the artistry and argumentative force of individual proverbs disappear.

Hartley is also strong on the theological and ethical range of the book. Wisdom, retribution, speech, marriage, wealth and poverty, neighbourly responsibility, and the relationship of wisdom to Christian interpretation receive sustained attention, while the commentary’s Wesleyan orientation makes the movement toward moral formation and application explicit. His indebtedness to Fox and Yoder is evident in the generally careful exegetical foundation beneath these theological discussions.

The reason Hartley does not enter my core five is not weakness but relative originality. Fox is more decisive on difficult philology and textual criticism, Ansberry offers a more distinctive account of character formation, Waltke is vastly more comprehensive technically and theologically, Overland advances a bolder account of compositional coherence, and Clifford is more consistently original in literary and rhetorical interpretation. Hartley is therefore a strong and dependable commentary that I would gladly use, but under the deliberately demanding Commentary Compass criterion of originality plus usefulness, I would retain it at four and a half stars rather than enlarge the five-star list merely because it is newly read.

Final Assessment

The additional reading has strengthened rather than overturned my original ranking. Michael Fox remains my first choice when a difficult Hebrew text, translation problem, or competing interpretation needs adjudication; Christopher Ansberry remains the most compelling guide to Proverbs as an education in character; Bruce Waltke remains indispensable for technical evangelical exegesis and theological synthesis; Paul Overland is still the most stimulating recent advocate of extensive literary and pedagogical coherence; and Richard Clifford remains exceptionally rewarding for rhetorical reading and creative anthologizing.

What has changed is the range of resources I would now place beside those five. Katharine Dell deserves a full five stars as the strongest newly added theological companion, especially because her account of creation, divine agency, Woman Wisdom, social ethics, and canonical relationships exposes how inadequate the old description of Proverbs as comparatively “secular” really is. Alexander Kirk substantially changes the conversation about Proverbs 30, Sergio Rotasperti makes metaphor central to how the sages form perception, Roland Murphy clarifies how different wisdom genres teach, and Joel Atwood opens a window onto the embodied conceptual world hidden behind English translations of rûaḥ.

Hartley’s new presence is also useful because it confirms an important distinction in the Commentary Compass rankings. A commentary can be excellent, dependable, pastorally rich, and worth owning without quite reaching the five-star “Most Insightful” threshold, because that category asks whether a work repeatedly adds something unusually original as well as useful. Hartley belongs very near that boundary; the five core commentaries above remain on the other side of it.

The best Proverbs library is therefore increasingly complementary rather than hierarchical. Fox protects against unsupported ingenuity, Waltke and Overland make us notice possible literary connections, Ansberry explains how those texts form people, Clifford shows how editorial juxtaposition creates meaning, Dell discloses the theological world holding the sayings together, Rotasperti and Atwood recover dimensions of Hebrew imagery and embodiment that translation can conceal, Murphy clarifies the rhetoric of wisdom forms, and Kirk demonstrates what becomes possible when a supposedly miscellaneous chapter is read with sustained attention to voice and tone. Proverbs itself teaches that wisdom comes through listening to multiple counsellors, and the commentary field turns out to illustrate the point unusually well.