Poor, much-maligned
wife of the last chapter of Proverbs! Google her and see. After you get through
the usual commentary citations, much of what you find is Christians complaining:
- Complaining that the woman in King Lemuel’s acrostic poem is an anachronism. (She isn’t.)
- Complaining that the poem should have been about men instead and rewriting it for our benefit. (It wasn’t written about men. Deal with it.)
- Complaining that Proverbs 31 is not about a “real woman”, it’s about “wisdom” as a concept. (Possibly true, but irrelevant: if it’s about wisdom as a concept, it’s about how that concept looks when it is worked out in the life of a married woman.)
- Complaining that single women (like Ruth before she married Boaz) should be considered “Proverbs 31 women” too. (A single women may be all kinds of wonderful things but the one thing she cannot be is an “excellent wife”, which happens to be the subject matter of this chapter.)
- Complaining that the chapter gets used as a checklist by which modern Christian wives are judged by others.
Hmm, that last one may
have a grain of truth to it ...