Proverbs 11:7 — “When the wicked dies, his hope will perish, and the expectation of wealth perishes too.”

A Proverb and a Funeral

A friend once told me about a funeral he attended for a man known around town as a cheat. The deceased had spent forty years cutting corners and burning bridges. The pastor, searching for something true to say, quoted Proverbs 11:7. The point was clear enough: this man had built his life on greed, and now every scheme he ever hatched was dust. The verse did its work in that room. No one argued.

But then the pastor added a step the proverb never takes. He said the verse proves that when a wicked person dies, the offer of grace dies with him. Hope is gone, the door is shut, and God has nothing left to say. The proverb became a doctrine of eternal foreclosure.

That move is common. Pastors, commentators, and theologians have used Proverbs 11:7 to argue that the moment of death seals a wicked person's fate for good. Wayne Grudem, for example, treats Old Testament texts about the death of the wicked as evidence that Scripture consistently teaches a fixed-at-death destiny.¹ John MacArthur makes similar use of the Proverbs, reading their contrasts between the righteous and the wicked as flat doctrinal statements about eternity.² The logic is simple: the Bible says the wicked person's hope perishes at death, so hope perishes at death. Case closed.

I believe that reading asks the proverb to carry a weight its genre was never designed to bear. To see why, we need to understand what a proverb actually is. And to understand that, we need to set aside the assumption that every sentence in the Bible functions the same way. A law in Deuteronomy, a parable in Luke, a vision in Revelation, and a proverb in Solomon's collection are all Scripture. But they communicate truth in very different ways. Genre matters. It especially matters here.

The Text in Its Own World

Proverbs 11 belongs to the large central collection of the book (chapters 10–22). This section is built from two-line contrasts: the righteous versus the wicked, the wise versus the foolish. Each verse stands on its own as a compact observation. Here is 11:7 in context:

The surrounding verses track a single theme: the contrast between what happens to the righteous and what happens to the wicked. The righteous are delivered; the wicked are trapped. The righteous escape trouble; the wicked stumble into it. Verse 7 fits the same pattern. When a wicked person dies, the things he spent his life chasing come to nothing. The proverb does not say anything about what God does next. It simply notes the bankruptcy.

The Hebrew is worth a close look. The phrase when a wicked man dies (Hebrew be-mot adam rasha, "at the death of a wicked person") sets the scene at the moment of death.³ What perishes is his hope (Hebrew tikvah, "expectation, hope"), a word that in Proverbs regularly refers to the this-worldly plans and prospects a person clings to.⁴ The second line reinforces the point: the expectation of wealth (Hebrew tocheleth onim) perishes too.⁵ Bruce Waltke notes that tocheleth here carries a sense of "anxious expectation," the thing a person has been waiting for and counting on.⁶ What dies with the wicked man is not some abstract theological category. It is the bundle of schemes, profits, and ambitions that he built his life around.

To understand what this verse is doing, you have to understand what a proverb is. A proverb (Hebrew mashal) is not a law, a promise, or a doctrinal thesis. It is a compressed observation about how life generally works.⁷ Tremper Longman describes proverbs as "generalizations, not absolute promises," observations distilled from experience that hold true as a rule but do not claim to cover every case.⁸ Roland Murphy puts the same point this way: proverbs describe the typical, not the exceptionless.⁹

This matters because the entire book of Proverbs depends on genre to be read rightly. If we read proverbs as absolute laws, the book contradicts itself within a single chapter.

The Heart of the Defense

Proverbs Are Generalizations, Not Exceptionless Laws

The clearest proof that proverbs are generalizations is that the book sometimes places two proverbs side by side that flatly contradict each other if read as absolutes. The most famous pair sits in Proverbs 26:

Both cannot be obeyed at the same time in the same situation. The editor who placed them together knew that. The point is that each captures a real truth about a different kind of moment. Sometimes you should answer the fool; sometimes you should not. Wisdom is knowing which moment you are in.¹⁰

Or consider Proverbs 10:4: "A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich." Is that always true? Are there no hard-working people who remain poor? The book itself knows the answer. Proverbs 13:23 says, "The fallow ground of the poor would yield much food, but it is swept away through injustice." Hard work does not always produce wealth, because injustice can destroy what diligence builds. Both proverbs are true. Neither is an exceptionless law.¹¹

Michael Fox, one of the leading scholars of Hebrew wisdom, stresses that proverbs function as guidelines rooted in experience, not as guarantees.¹² Waltke agrees: "The proverbs are not promises but pointers, not guarantees but guides."¹³ Once we grasp this, the pressure on 11:7 eases. The proverb observes something true: when a wicked person dies, the things he lived for die with him. It is a sober, accurate observation. But treating it as an absolute metaphysical claim about what God can or cannot do after that death is asking the proverb to speak beyond its genre.

Think of Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it." Every pastor and parent knows this is not a guarantee. Godly parents have watched their children walk away from the faith. Does that mean the proverb is false? No. It means the proverb captures a pattern that holds generally. Good training usually bears fruit. But exceptions exist, and the proverb does not pretend otherwise.³⁴ The same flexibility belongs to 11:7. The wicked person's hope usually does perish at death, because a life built on greed produces nothing lasting. But the proverb is not telling us what God's grace can or cannot do at the threshold.

Some scholars describe this pattern as the "retribution principle" of Proverbs: righteousness leads to blessing, wickedness leads to ruin. It is a real principle, and the sages believed in it. But the Old Testament itself provides the corrective. The book of Job is one long, agonized protest against pressing the retribution principle into an absolute. Job's friends assume that suffering always means sin. Job knows it does not. And God vindicates Job, not the friends (Job 42:7). The entire wisdom tradition, read as a whole, warns against treating its generalizations as iron laws. Proverbs states the rule. Job states the exception. Together they teach wisdom.³⁰

What the Proverb Actually Observes

Read the second line of the verse again: "the expectation of wealth perishes too." The proverb is not staring past death into eternity. It is staring at death, at the moment when a greedy person's plans come apart. The wicked man spent his years chasing gain. He expected his wealth to protect him, his connections to outlast trouble, his schemes to pay off. Death ends all of that.

This is the same point made throughout the wisdom tradition. Psalm 49:16–17 tells us not to be afraid when a man becomes rich, because "when he dies he will carry nothing away; his glory will not go down after him." Ecclesiastes 5:15 agrees: a person leaves the world as naked as he entered it, taking nothing for his toil. The observation is practical, not eschatological. Death strips away everything the wicked person counted on.¹⁴

Longman notes that the "hope" and "expectation" in Proverbs 11:7 are best understood as future plans tied to the present life. They are not a theological statement about the afterlife.¹⁵ The proverb says nothing about Sheol, nothing about judgment, nothing about the soul's destination after death. It makes a down-to-earth point: a life built on wickedness is a life whose dividends do not survive the grave. That is wisdom. It is not a verdict on whether God's grace can reach a dying person.

Notice how the rest of Proverbs 11 keeps the same focus. Verse 4 says, "Riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death." Verse 28 adds, "Whoever trusts in his riches will fall, but the righteous will flourish like a green leaf." The "day of wrath" in view here is the day of calamity in a person's lifetime, the day when trouble catches up with the greedy. The whole chapter contrasts how different kinds of people fare in the observable course of life. No verse in Proverbs 11 looks beyond the grave into an eternal courtroom.³¹

Proverbs 24:19–20 makes the same observation with a different image: "Fret not yourself because of evildoers, and be not envious of the wicked, for the evil man has no future; the lamp of the wicked will be put out." The "future" (acharith) is the expected outcome, the anticipated end of a path. And the "lamp" is a common image in Proverbs for a person's ongoing prosperity and legacy (cf. 13:9; 20:20). When the lamp goes out, the wicked person's line of fortune ends. This is the proverb's subject. It is not speculating on grace, judgment, or God's power over the dead.³²

Wisdom Literature Is Not the Place to Build an Eschatology

There is a broader principle at work here, and this chapter is where the book names it plainly. Wisdom literature in the Old Testament speaks from observation, from what the sages can see and measure in the world around them. This is especially clear in Ecclesiastes, which frames its entire project as life "under the sun" (Hebrew tachat ha-shemesh), the observed world of human experience (Chapter 20). But the principle reaches beyond Ecclesiastes. Proverbs, too, distills its wisdom from watching what happens to real people in the real world.¹⁶

That is why the wisdom books are largely silent on the afterlife. The Old Testament sages did not have a developed doctrine of resurrection. They had no clear map of the intermediate state, no New Testament picture of Christ's descent to the dead. Their horizon was the observable life. They could say what happens to the wicked man's plans at death. But they were not in a position to say what happens to his soul after death. Their only category for life beyond the grave was Sheol, the dim and undifferentiated silence of the dead.¹⁷

Robin Parry makes this observation about the Old Testament's trajectory. The OT has no clear picture of individual life after death until the very end of the period, with Daniel 12:2. Before that, the vision of God's saving purposes is applied only to the living.¹⁸ This is not because God's reach stops at death. It is because the theological categories had not yet developed to say otherwise. Progressive revelation means that later biblical texts fill in what the wisdom books could not yet see. The New Testament transforms the picture. Building a doctrine of eternal foreclosure on a genre that lacks the categories to discuss eternity is like building a doctrine of aviation on a text written before anyone knew humans could fly.

Parry's point is not that the Old Testament contradicts the hope of saving grace beyond death. His point is that the OT simply has not arrived there yet. It is a way station on a longer road. To freeze revelation at that way station and declare, "See, no hope after death!" is to confuse the limits of a stage with the conclusion of the journey.

The Psalter Says the Opposite about God and Sheol

If wisdom literature is the wrong genre for building an eschatology, the Old Testament is also not silent on God's reach beyond death. Within the same wisdom stream, the Psalter offers a striking contrast to Proverbs 11:7. Psalm 49 begins with the familiar observation that no human being can ransom another person from death:

Read in isolation, those verses sound like a locked door. No ransom, no escape, no hope. But the psalm does not stop there. A few verses later, the psalmist turns from human inability to divine power:

The same psalm that says no human can ransom a brother says God can ransom from Sheol. The door that money cannot open is a door that God can. I will develop this text at length in Chapter 21. But the point matters here for a simple reason: even within the Old Testament's own wisdom tradition, the picture is not as flat as Proverbs 11:7 might suggest when read alone. The proverb says the wicked man's earthly hopes die with him. The psalm says God's reach extends into the realm of the dead. Both are true. They speak to different questions.¹⁹

The Scholarly Conversation

The question of how to read Proverbs 11:7 depends almost entirely on how one reads the genre of wisdom literature. On this, the major scholars are largely in agreement, even when they disagree on other theological questions.

Bruce Waltke, whose two-volume commentary on Proverbs is among the most respected in the field, is clear that proverbs are "pattern-setting," not "propositional" in the sense of absolute truth-claims. They model wisdom; they do not legislate certainty.²⁰ On 11:7 specifically, Waltke notes that the verse describes "the bankruptcy of a godless life" at death, the collapse of everything the wicked person trusted in. He does not read it as a pronouncement on the soul's eternal state.²¹

Longman makes the same move. He describes the entire collection of Proverbs 10–22 as "observational wisdom," sentences that record what typically happens when people follow one path or another. They are trustworthy as generalizations. They are not meant to function as predictive guarantees or metaphysical decrees.²²

Murphy situates the verse within the broader theme of "the two ways" in Proverbs: the righteous way that leads to life and the wicked way that leads to ruin. He stresses that this two-ways framework operates primarily at the level of earthly experience. The sages were talking about what they could observe, and what they observed was that wicked schemes end badly.²³

Fox goes further. He argues that the wisdom literature as a whole is uncomfortable with absolute claims. The sages knew that exceptions exist. They knew the righteous sometimes suffer and the wicked sometimes prosper. The book of Job explores that tension head-on, and Ecclesiastes explores it from a different angle. The proverbs are true as a class, as a pattern, as a general rule of life. They were never designed to be pressed into service as metaphysical certainties.²⁴

I want to linger on this point, because it matters for how we read every wisdom text in this section of the book. When someone builds a doctrine of eternal foreclosure on Proverbs 11:7, they are treating a genre the way Job's friends treated it. Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar assumed that the retribution principle was absolute. If you are suffering, you must have sinned. That logic is a straight line, and it is wrong. God said so (Job 42:7). The sages who wrote Proverbs believed in the retribution principle as a general pattern. But the editors who placed Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes side by side in the canon believed something more: that wisdom is bigger than any single proverb, and that God is bigger than any single pattern.³³

Andrew Hronich, writing from a universalist perspective, draws on this same scholarly consensus about genre. He observes that Old Testament wisdom about the fate of the wicked consistently describes this-worldly outcomes. The premature death, the ruined estate, the collapsed reputation: these are the things the sages observed and recorded. None of these observations says anything about whether God's saving work continues beyond the grave. Hronich notes that even the Proverbs' own language of "the lamp of the wicked" being "put out" (Proverbs 24:20) fits this pattern. It describes the extinction of earthly fortune, not an eschatological decree about the soul.²⁵

But What About…?

“It Plainly Says the Wicked’s Hope Perishes at Death.”

It does. And as a generalization about a wicked life's expectations, it is exactly right. When a wicked person dies, every plan he laid for himself collapses. Every deal, every advantage, every scheme comes to nothing. The proverb is not wrong. It is just not saying what the objector wants it to say. The "hope" that perishes is tikvah, the this-worldly expectation, the anticipated payoff of a godless life. The verse says nothing about the hope that God might offer.²⁶ To read it as a statement that God's grace also perishes at death, you have to import a claim the proverb never makes.

“Proverbs Is Still Inspired Scripture.”

Yes, it is. And inspired Scripture comes in genres, each of which communicates truth in its own way. The Psalms are inspired as poetry. The parables of Jesus are inspired as parables. The apocalyptic visions of Revelation are inspired as apocalyptic. The book of Proverbs is inspired as wisdom-genre generalization. Inspiration means the proverb is true in the way proverbs are true: as a reliable generalization about life, not as a timeless metaphysical absolute.²⁷

We already know this instinctively. We do not read "a soft answer turns away wrath" (Proverbs 15:1) as a guarantee that no gentle person will ever be shouted at. We do not read "commit your work to the LORD, and your plans will be established" (Proverbs 16:3) as a promise that every devout business venture will succeed. We read these as wisdom, as something true enough to guide a life. The same respect for genre should govern how we read 11:7. The proverb is inspired. It is also a proverb. Those two facts work together, not against each other.

The Failed Hopes of a Wicked Life and the Enduring Mercy of God

Proverbs 11:7 is a true and sobering verse. It tells us that a life built on selfishness is a life whose returns expire at the grave. The wicked man's plans die with him. His wealth cannot follow him. His schemes produce nothing that lasts. If that truth makes us uneasy, good. The proverb is doing its job. It is pressing us to build on something sturdier than greed.

But the proverb is not a doctrine of the afterlife. It is not a ruling on God's ability to reach the dying. It is not a metaphysical decree that the offer of grace expires when the heart stops. It is a wisdom-genre observation about the futility of wicked hopes, written in a period when the Old Testament's understanding of what comes after death was still dim and undeveloped. To press it into service as proof that God's saving grace is sealed off at death is to overload a proverb with a freight it was never built to carry.

I have sat with families who needed to hear this distinction. When the person they loved lived a hard, selfish life and then died without any clear turn toward God, they do not need to be told that a proverb about collapsed earthly schemes has locked the door forever. They need to hear that the wicked man's own hopes die at death, yes. That is the Bible's honest observation. But God's hope for that man does not run on the same track as the man's hope for himself. God's purposes are not the wicked man's schemes, and God's reach is not limited to the wicked man's lifetime.

A woman once asked me after a Bible study, "My brother was not a good man. He cheated people, he hurt his family, and he died alone. Does Proverbs mean there is no hope for him at all?" I told her what I believe is true: the proverb means that everything her brother built for himself is gone. His schemes died with him. His money cannot help him now. That part is real. But the question of whether God can still reach her brother, whether God met him in those last moments or can meet him still, is a question the proverb was never written to answer. It is a question answered by the character of God, by the Christ who descended to the dead (Appendix A), and by the psalmist who believed God could ransom a soul from Sheol itself.

The same Old Testament that produced Proverbs 11:7 also produced Psalm 49:15, where God ransoms a soul from the power of Sheol (Chapter 21). It produced the book of Ecclesiastes, whose "under the sun" observations about death and uncertainty we will examine next (Chapter 20). And it produced a trajectory of progressive revelation that leads, through Daniel's resurrection hope and Isaiah's promise that "your dead shall live" (Isaiah 26:19), to a Christ who holds the keys of Death and Hades (Revelation 1:18).²⁸

There is a long distance between a proverb about the bankruptcy of a greedy life and a doctrine that seals a soul against God's mercy forever. The proverb earns its place in Scripture. It tells us something true about what wickedness produces. But it does not tell us the limits of what God's grace can reach. And that, for anyone sitting beside a dying person or grieving one already gone, makes all the difference.

Notes

↑ 1. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), ch. 41. Grudem treats the Old Testament's warnings about the fate of the wicked as part of a unified biblical case for a fixed-at-death destiny.

↑ 2. John MacArthur, The MacArthur Bible Commentary (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2005). MacArthur reads the contrasts in Proverbs 10–15 as direct, propositional claims about righteousness and wickedness, without significant qualification for genre.

↑ 3. The Hebrew phrase be-mot adam rasha (literally "in the death of a man, a wicked one") uses the infinitive construct of mut ("to die") with the preposition be, placing the action at the moment of the wicked person's death.

↑ 4. The noun tikvah appears ten times in Proverbs. In nearly every instance (10:28; 11:7, 23; 13:12; 19:18; 23:18; 24:14; 26:12; 29:20), the context ties it to this-worldly outcomes: the righteous person's hope leads to joy; the wicked person's hope leads to wrath or disappointment. The word carries a forward-looking sense of anticipated results, not a theological concept of eternal hope.

↑ 5. The second line is textually debated. The ESV follows the Masoretic Text with "the expectation of wealth" (tocheleth onim). Some scholars emend onim ("wealth" or "strength") to avenim ("the godless"), reading "the expectation of the godless perishes." Either way, the verse describes the collapse of the wicked person's this-worldly anticipation. See Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1–15, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 487–88.

↑ 6. Waltke, Proverbs 1–15, 488.

↑ 7. The Hebrew mashal covers a range of literary forms: proverb, parable, taunt, byword. In the sentence-literature of Proverbs 10–22, it refers to the short, two-line observation that captures a typical pattern of human experience. See Roland E. Murphy, Proverbs, WBC 22 (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), xxii–xxvi.

↑ 8. Tremper Longman III, Proverbs, Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006), 42–44.

↑ 9. Murphy, Proverbs, xxvi–xxvii.

↑ 10. The juxtaposition of Proverbs 26:4–5 is the most commonly cited example of the genre's self-qualifying nature. Longman notes that the editor placed these two proverbs side by side precisely to signal that wisdom requires discernment, not mechanical application. See Longman, Proverbs, 466–67.

↑ 11. The tension between 10:4 (diligence brings wealth) and 13:23 (injustice sweeps away the poor's produce) is one of many examples. See also 22:6 ("Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it"), which every experienced parent and pastor knows admits of heartbreaking exceptions.

↑ 12. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10–31: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, AB 18B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–8.

↑ 13. Waltke, Proverbs 1–15, 77.

↑ 14. The parallel with Psalm 49:16–17 and Ecclesiastes 5:15 suggests a common wisdom tradition: death levels all earthly advantage. None of these texts claims to describe what God does to the soul after death; all describe what death does to the wicked person's earthly portfolio.

↑ 15. Longman, Proverbs, 251.

↑ 16. Murphy describes the epistemological stance of Proverbs as rooted in "the observations of the sages," a tradition of noticing patterns in human behavior and recording them for the next generation. See Murphy, Proverbs, xxiv–xxvi.

↑ 17. For a full treatment of the Old Testament picture of Sheol and its development, see Appendix C. The OT's Sheol is a shadowy, largely undifferentiated realm where the dead exist in diminished awareness (Ps 6:5; 88:10–12; Isa 38:18). The New Testament fills this picture in dramatically.

↑ 18. Robin Parry (Gregory MacDonald), The Evangelical Universalist, 2nd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2012), ch. 2. Parry argues that the Old Testament's universal vision for humanity extends only to those who are living, because it lacks the categories for individual life after death. Daniel 12:2 is the first clear break in that horizon.

↑ 19. The relationship between Proverbs 11:7 and Psalm 49:15 is a textbook case of letting Scripture interpret Scripture across genres. The proverb speaks to what a wicked life's plans yield at death. The psalm speaks to what God can do despite death. They address different questions, and no responsible reading pits one against the other.

↑ 20. Waltke, Proverbs 1–15, 76–78. Waltke distinguishes between pattern-setting wisdom (proverbs model patterns) and propositional truth-claims (laws state absolutes). Proverbs belong to the first category.

↑ 21. Waltke, Proverbs 1–15, 488–89.

↑ 22. Longman, Proverbs, 42–44.

↑ 23. Murphy, Proverbs, lii–lv.

↑ 24. Fox, Proverbs 10–31, 1–8.

↑ 25. Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved: The Logic of Apokatastasis (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2023), ch. 5. Hronich notes that Old Testament language about the destruction of the wicked consistently describes intrahistorical outcomes. Robert Peterson, writing from the opposing side, concurs that many such texts "speak of God visiting the wicked with premature death" rather than describing their final eschatological fate.

↑ 26. The distinction is between the wicked person's tikvah (his own self-generated expectations) and the hope that God extends to sinners. Proverbs 11:7 addresses the first category. It is silent on the second.

↑ 27. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), Article XVIII, affirms that "we deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose." Reading a proverb as though it were a doctrinal proposition violates this principle by imposing an alien standard of precision on a genre that communicates through generalization.

↑ 28. The trajectory from Sheol-silence to resurrection hope moves through several stages: the dim picture of Sheol in the early OT (Ps 6:5; 88:10–12), the glimmer of God's power over Sheol (Ps 49:15; Ps 16:10), the explicit resurrection prophecy (Isa 26:19; Dan 12:2), and the New Testament's full picture of Christ's victory over death (1 Cor 15:54–57; Rev 1:18). See Chapter 22 for the Isaiah 38 text, and Appendix C for the full taxonomy of the dead.

↑ 29. Lamentations 3:22–23: "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." The poet of Lamentations, writing amid the worst disaster Israel had known, affirmed a mercy that does not run out. If it does not run out amid national destruction, there is no reason to believe it runs out at the bedside of a dying man.

↑ 30. On the relationship between Proverbs' retribution principle and Job's protest against its misapplication, see Murphy, Proverbs, lv–lviii, and Longman, Proverbs, 55–58. Both note that the canonical placement of Proverbs alongside Job signals an intentional dialogue within the wisdom tradition: the generalizations of Proverbs are real, but they are not the whole picture.

↑ 31. The "day of wrath" in Proverbs 11:4 (yom evrah) is debated. Some interpreters read it eschatologically (the final judgment), but the dominant wisdom-literature interpretation sees it as the day of calamity, the day when trouble catches up. See Waltke, Proverbs 1–15, 484–85.

↑ 32. On the "lamp" imagery in Proverbs, see Fox, Proverbs 10–31, 285–86. The lamp represents ongoing life, prosperity, and legacy. When it is "put out," the line of good fortune ends. This is an earthly observation, not an eschatological verdict.

↑ 33. The canonical arrangement of wisdom books is itself a hermeneutical signal. Proverbs states the general rules; Job tests them against hard cases; Ecclesiastes questions them from the standpoint of observable experience. Together, the three books model a wisdom tradition that resists absolutizing any single principle. See Kathleen A. Farmer, "The Wisdom Books," in The Cambridge Companion to the Bible, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

↑ 34. Proverbs 22:6 is perhaps the most pastoral example of a proverb read as an absolute guarantee. Parents who raised their children faithfully and watched them walk away from the faith sometimes blame themselves, believing the proverb promised an outcome it only described as typical. See Longman, Proverbs, 408–9, on reading 22:6 as a generalization rather than a covenant promise.

The Death of the Wicked