his folly would not depart from him (xxvii. 22),
and especially the paradoxical exhibition of the two sides of a truth—
Answer not the stupid man according to his folly,
lest thou thyself also become like unto him:
Answer the stupid man according to his folly,
lest he regard himself as wise (xxvi. 4, 5),
where the first distich dissuades from retaliating on a fool by a word or an action on his own low moral plane, while the second recommends giving his folly the exposure or the sharp answer which it so richly deserves.[[195]] The wide meaning of ‘folly’ in this pair of proverbs may be illustrated by xvii. 12, where it evidently means a paroxysm of passion. Next to this noisy passionate ‘folly,’ if we may judge from the arrangement of chap. xxvi., comes the vice of idleness (xxvi. 13-16). How dangerous this was felt to be we have seen already, and the exhortation to agricultural industry in xxvii. 23-27 forms a counterpart to the meditation on the ‘field of the slothful’ in xxiv. 30-32. If the motives urged for this and other duties are not lofty, the standard is at least an easily attainable one.
Sometimes, indeed, the eye sharpened by a regard to prudence discerns moral points of some refinement.[[196]] This proverb, for instance, strikes one as delicate, in spite of the prudential motive attached to it in the next verse,—
Conduct thy quarrel with thy neighbour,
but expose not the secret of another (xxv. 9);