Proverbs 22:6-8
New American Bible (Revised Edition)
6 Train the young in the way they should go;
even when old, they will not swerve from it.[a]
7 The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is the slave of the lender.[b]
8 Those who sow iniquity reap calamity,(A)
and the rod used in anger will fail.[c]
Footnotes
- 22:6 One of the few exhortations in the collection (cf. 14:7; 16:3; 19:18, 20). “Way” in the first colon has been taken in two different senses: (1) the morally right way, “according to the way one ought to go”; (2) personal aptitude, i.e., the manner of life for which one is destined, as “the way of Egypt” (Is 10:24). Neither interpretation, however, accounts for the pronoun in the Hebrew phrase, lit., “his own way.” The most natural solution is to take the whole as ironic advice (like 19:27): yes, go ahead and let the young do exactly what they want; they will become self-willed adults.
- 22:7 An observation on money and power. One who borrows becomes poor in the sense of indebted, a slave to the lender.
- 22:8 Agricultural metaphors express the failure of malicious actions. In the first line, bad actions are seeds yielding trouble. In the second line, “the rod” is a flail used to beat grains as in Is 28:27.
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