Proverbs 19:8 Commentary and Bible Study

The word translated ‘wisdom’ is not the usual word, but is the Hebrew for ‘heart’. It refers here to a heart that is equipped with understanding and wisdom, all that the heart has stored up which enables it to assess the changing scenes of life and to navigate life’s difficulties and perplexities. A large part of this wisdom is concerned with relationships and handling people, whose behaviour is far harder to discern than that of inanimate objects. To discern human behaviour requires us to be able to read character, to know the heart of man and what influences him to turn one way or another. If wisdom brings its own reward to its owner, it especially does so in the area of friendship, for this is a large part of the happiness we have in this world. A human friend is a marvel in the midst of a mechanistic and mindless universe of unimaginable size, a fellow being like us that shares the same rare capacity to think and feel, and who is capable of understanding something of our inner experience. That experience is hidden from the world, even from the highest fellow creatures around us, the animals. Adam rightly concluded that before Eve was made there were none capable of being fit companions to him, none to whom he could reflect on his joys and sorrows, loves and hates, and who could grasp something of what he was saying and reflect back to him an echo of his own experience from a centre of consciousness just like his own.