If you were here with us back in the second installment of this series on Proverbs, you may recall that for ease of reference
I divided the book into seven sections and an introduction. We have now
reached section 3.
With perhaps one exception I can currently recall, section 2, the longest in the book, is filled with two-line
proverbs. The advantage of two-liners is that they are tremendously memorable.
The disadvantage we discovered is that in the absence of context — and
proverbs are by their nature decontextualized — the briefer a sentence in
Hebrew, the more difficult it is to discern its meaning.
That’s a pretty significant disadvantage.