Beauty and Totalizing Description as Praise

In a 2005 article, Victor Hurowitz offered a fresh perspective on the nature of the praise in Prov 31:10–31, comparing it to an Akkadian physiognomic omen text, Šumma sinništu qaqqada rabât, “If a Woman is Large of Head.” The physiognomic text belongs to a collection of omens in which the woman’s described physical appearance is linked to nonphysical characteristics or outcomes for the woman’s future behavior.^{Footnote 6} For example, the size of a woman’s hands are said to be indicative, in this text, of how she will run her household:^{Footnote 7}

A comparison of this Akkadian omen text with Prov 31:10–31 highlights a shared rhetorical strategy: detailed, systematic description. In the omen text, the speaker’s description of the subject is presented as exhaustive of physiological possibilities, moving from one extreme to another—in other words, the hands are large or small, long or short.^{Footnote 8} Because the presentational strategy aims toward a totality, I call this kind of description “totalizing.” While the physiognomic text quoted above does not move systematically from head to toe, as body description poems do, it does share a fundamental descriptive strategy with the head-to-toe description: it moves from one extreme to another. This strategy implies the whole without necessarily listing components between the one end and the other.^{Footnote 9}

The rhetorical strategy of totalizing description is at work in Song 4:1–7, in the lover’s head-to-toe description of the poem’s subject. There are four compositions in Song of Songs, conventionally identified as a waṣf, that conform to a similar strategy for describing physical attributes.^{Footnote 10} The composition in Song 4:1–7 moves from the woman’s head downward, with a concluding statement of the totality of the description: “All of you is beautiful … not a blemish on you.” The description of the male lover in Song 5:10–16 moves downward, then transitioning from the subject’s legs (v. 15) back to the subject’s mouth (v. 16), concluding “All of him is delightful.” Song 7:1–9 describes the physical attributes of a subject likewise in a sequential manner but does so from bottom to top. Song 6:4–10 resumes much of the language and expressions in Song 4:1–7. Three of the four compositions open and close with a statement about the unique beauty of the poem’s subject,^{Footnote 11} and one bears a concluding statement, consisting of four poetic lines, which opens with the declaration of beauty.^{Footnote 12} From this small sample, one might posit that such detailed accounts of the body aim at persuading the reader of the subject’s total perfection.

Totalizing description in these texts are not only discourses of praise; they also manifest the value of beauty as corporeal wholeness or perfection. Similarly, Absalom is described in 2 Sam 14:25 as a “beautiful man,” who was “Without blemish, from the sole of his foot to the top of his head.” In Dan 1:4, the king orders elite Israelites to be brought before him, “Youths without a single blemish, of fine appearance.” Beauty rarely privileges one single, stable set of values in any given culture at any given time, but it is clear that there exists a “perfection” or a “blemish-free” dimension to beauty as it is described in biblical literature.^{Footnote 13} Moreover, the frequent association of Hebrew יפי, “beauty,” with other terms such as תאר, “form,” and מראה, “appearance,” indicate that יפי designates an externally evaluated state.^{Footnote 14}

Another example of totalizing description, examined in Victor Hurowitz’s study, is a Hebrew text found in the Babylonian Talmud, in Nedarim 66b. In this text, a man vows that his wife will not sexually benefit from him until she can demonstrate that any aspect of herself is beautiful to R. Ishmael, son of R. Jose, who seems to be, in such a ridiculously hypothetical situation, serving as the judge. R. Ishmael appears to consult others to determine whether the woman, as a whole, might be judged “beautiful.” R. Ishmael describes and evaluates the woman in parts, moving systematically from head to toe. In his evaluation, each body part is determined defective in some form: her hair has the appearance of “stalks of flax,” her eyes are “bleared,” her ears are “folded over,” her nose is “obstructed,” her lips are “thick,” her neck is “stubby,” her belly “protrudes,” and her feet “are as broad as those of a duck.”^{Footnote 15} Having failed to find a single nondefective physical attribute, R. Ishmael moves to evaluate the woman’s name, which translates to “Repulsive.” Such a list bears striking resemblance to the head-to-toe description in the Song of Songs, though it is actually an inversion of the expectation of praise.

Even more remarkable is the similarity of the description in Nedarim 66b to the Mesopotamian Göttertypentext, in which head-to-toe descriptions conclude with the entity’s name.^{Footnote 16} In the Talmudic passage, the joke seems to be that R. Ishmael had indeed discovered something יפה, “perfect,” in that the woman’s name, “Repulsive,” in his view perfectly accounted for her physical attributes. Here the rhetorical strategy is turned on its head, for its usual purpose seems to be to demonstrate praiseworthiness through corporeal perfection. But in this case, the perfection is the perceived correspondence of the woman’s physical attributes to her name.

If the aim of the describing poem is to demonstrate the subject’s observed flawlessness, a head-to-toe (or toe-to-head) examination of physical features might be rhetorically effective.^{Footnote 17} Similarly, the seemingly exact, totalizing description functions to demonstrate perfection in the Priestly account of creation and ordering of the cosmos (Gen 1:1–2:4a), the construction of the tabernacle (Exod 25–31), and the human body (Lev 12–15), as well as that of the creatures in Ezekiel’s vision (Ezek 1) and of Tyre as a ship (Ezek 27).^{Footnote 18} Other body-descriptions, reminiscent of the Mesopotamian Göttertypentext, can be found in biblical literature. One notable example is the description of Leviathan in Job 41, which concludes with a totalizing statement: “He is king over all prideful creatures.”

Totalizing description, or what Seth Sanders identifies as “exact description” in his study of the language of knowledge in Enoch and Priestly Hebrew, is a rhetorical strategy used by biblical authors to claim the perfection of an entity.^{Footnote 19} On initial examination, the poem in Prov 31:10–31 seems to argue the opposite of what is claimed in the body descriptions in Song of Songs. Those poems detail passive, external features of a body to claim its perfection, while the description of the woman in Prov 31:10–31 focuses entirely on her deeds. Upon closer reading, however, one sees that a focus on her deeds is precisely the point. The poem presents a detailed description of the woman’s actions instead of her passive features.

The description in Prov 31:10–31 begins with a summary statement of her value (v. 10b) and the effect of this value, as behavior, on her husband’s accumulated success (v. 11b). Her value, or perhaps the price paid for her, was high, but the return on investment justifies the value. What follows this summary statement is a description of the woman’s deeds in a systematic fashion that details the return on the husband’s investment. She seeks out and works raw materials (v. 13); she seeks out a network for commerce (v. 14); she works even when the rest of the household is at rest to provide for their basic needs (v. 15); she seeks out land and plants the seeds for future harvests (v. 16); she does all this in a manner that ensures the continuity of the investment (vv. 17–18). This first half of the poem represents the investment, not only the husband’s in the woman but the woman’s investment in raw materials and labor for future gains—gains that will turn out in the second half of the poem not only to be material but also to add to the family’s enduring reputation. The description continues after the mirror structure in vv. 19–20, with the praiseworthy effects of her deeds on her family and the promise of the continuity of her work. Because of her work, her family experiences safety and luxury (v. 21); her outward appearance indicates her success (v. 22); her husband gains prominence through her deeds (v. 23); she continues to build upon her success, moving from survival and safety to surplus and profit (v. 24); those qualities of strength and persistence she had striven toward in v. 17 become her actual self-presentation and persona among others (v. 25), ensuring continual future success. Finally, the development of the woman’s deeds results not only in material success, reputation, and future stability; the outcome of her deeds is also actualized in instruction (v. 26), which she offers to the future generation, in word and in deed (v. 27). It is this next generation, and the entire household, including the husband who acquired her in the first place, who attest to her praiseworthiness (vv. 28–29). The description concludes with a summary statement of the many daughters sought in marriage who perform valorously and with the required strength, but this one, according to her household, has surpassed them all (v. 29). This is the ideal of the return on investment—materially and conceptually—in deeds that lead one down the path for future success.

This detailed description, like a head-to-toe description, is a totalizing one. In this case, the description is not of the woman’s external features but instead details the full scope of her deeds—those required for survival, safety, success, and intergenerational posterity. The description evaluates these deeds in their logical unfolding throughout the poem as praiseworthy, concluding with the quoted speech of her husband in v. 29. One might expect a husband to praise the beauty of his bride, from head to toe, but in this case, it is only deeds and their outcomes that earn his praise. The poem upends the expectations of descriptive poems in order to advance an argument against passive, inborn beauty.^{Footnote 20} A comparison of the descriptive praise of the woman in Prov 31:10–31 to the descriptive praise of Sarai’s beauty in the Genesis Apocryphon will demonstrate this point. By subverting its very literary form, the poem in Prov 31:10–31 argues against the praiseworthiness of innate beauty and in favor of wisdom acquired through correct action.

Prov 31:10–31 as a Totalizing Description of Handiwork

The poem in Prov 31:10–31 has been characterized as a “final masterful portrait of Wisdom,” and even as “a series of disjointed descriptions … much like an impressionistic painting.”^{Footnote 21} And yet, while the alphabetic acrostic illustrates its feminine subject in a flurry of activity, the poem explicitly resists a portrait of the woman’s appearance—a decisive move against the kind of praise descriptions of the lovers’ bodies in Song of Songs. When we arrive at the conclusion of the poem, the categorical resistance against beauty that was previously implicit is now explicit. Beauty is not a virtue; its lasting value is dwarfed by that of the wisdom-acquisition system promoted throughout Proverbs, “the fear of Yahweh.”^{Footnote 22}

In the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen XX, 2–8), we find, as in Song 4:1–7, a totalizing description of Sarai’s physical features, a praise of perfection from head to toe.^{Footnote 23} The description is a response to the tradition narrated in Gen 12:15 that Pharaoh’s ministers are said to have praised Sarai’s appearance. There are two unusual and interconnected features of this head-to-toe praise that distinguish it from what might be otherwise a simple totalizing praise of Sarai’s beauty. First, the poem is centered thematically and structurally on her hands. In fact, more space is dedicated in the poem to Sarai’s hands than to any other single feature: two poetic units, five poetic lines. These poetic units are located roughly at the center of the poem:

More significantly, the concluding statement of the poem goes beyond her stated superlative beauty—“Of all the women her beauty exceeds, with her beauty she surpasses them all”^{Footnote 25}—and connects her beauty to her wisdom. The statement does so with a play on the semantics of the phrase ודלידיהא, literally, “that which is of her hands,” but grammaticalized in an expression of possession or authority, “all that is hers”:

The poem explicitly connects Sarai’s beauty to her wisdom, using her hands—the bodily organ representative of her agency—as the rhetorical link between the two. Sarai’s physical appearance is beautiful, perfect, linked to her wisdom and, ultimately, indicative of her capacity to produce and possess beauty.^{Footnote 27} This link is simply stated as Sarai’s two central virtues. The poem in the Genesis Apocryphon does not further reflect upon or refine a connection between beauty and wisdom.

Upon closer reading, one notices that the poem in Prov 31:10–31 is also centered on the subject’s hands but for a different reason than Sarai’s praise in the Genesis Apocryphon. In Prov 31:10–31, the thematic, lexical, and structural focus on hands is in service of highlighting the woman’s active deeds, not the perfection of her passive features. This argument is supported by two significant observations of the poem’s organization. The first observation is that the only poetic structure within the poem that forms a mirror pattern of ABB’A’, vv. 19–20, pivots on the two primary words used in the poem for the woman’s hands in action, יד, “hand,” and כף, “palm”: “Her hands, she sends out to the distaff, her palms grasp the spindle; her palm, she spreads out to the poor, her hands, she sends out to the needy.”^{Footnote 28} This mirror pattern concentrates on the juxtaposed “B” elements, “her palms grasp the spindle,” and “her palm, she spreads out to the poor,” with their distinct activities. The distinction is further highlighted by the fact that in the “A” elements the same verb is used (“she sends out”), though for different activities. By contrast, in the “B” elements of the line, the verbs used are clearly distinct: the woman’s palms are engaged in work within the household, and her palm (singular) extends her deeds to those beyond the realm of her responsibility, respectively.

The second observation supporting an argument that the poem focuses explicitly on the woman’s deeds as opposed to her passive, external features, is that the relevant elements of this mirror structure, “hands” and “palms”—along with the other “active” body part, her mouth, פה—function for both their semantic content and as the proper names for their representative letters in the alphabet. The terms “hands” and “palms,” both as lexemes for hands and as the proper names for the letters of the alphabet, open their respective lines in the poem (vv. 19, 20, and 26).^{Footnote 29} The rhetorical strategy of totalizing description—the head-to-toe scan of the subject’s body parts, as in Song 4:1–7—prioritizes external, passive, inborn unblemished beauty. Through a totalizing description of the deeds of the woman in Prov 31:10–31, this rhetorical device is reimagined. The illustration of the woman’s actions raises the value of active, learned wisdom above passive, natural beauty.

The poem focuses on the woman’s hands as agents of productivity. In v. 13, she produces material objects—cloth—with the willingness of her hands: “She seeks out wool and flax, she produces with willing hands.”^{Footnote 30} In v. 16, the figurative fruits—the products—of her handiwork enable her to generate future actual fruit: “She considers a plot of land and buys it, from the fruit of her hands she plants a vineyard.” A variation on the phrase in v. 16, “from the fruit of her hands,” appears in the concluding line of the poem, v. 31, calling on the readers to praise her for her labors, “for the fruit of her hands.”

Even the introduction of so-called militaristic imagery in v. 17 mentions neither יד nor כף but rather the term זרוע, “arm,” a term evocative of the woman’s productivity and perhaps even procreativity: “She girds her loins with strength, she steadies her arms.” In the context of a superlative wife, militaristic imagery might seem out of place; however, the description recalls the militaristic connotations of her moniker at the outset of the poem, אשׁת חיל, a “valiant woman.”^{Footnote 31} More playfully, the description of her girding of her loins introduces a new, yet unmentioned, part of the woman’s body, and it is placed in parallel with “her arms” but perhaps also recalling another sense of the root of זרע, “seed.”^{Footnote 32}

Hands—or palms, or arms—are the only part of the woman’s body to make multiple appearances in the poem. The phrase “her hands” appears three times, and at significant points: twice in the only mirror structure of the poem (vv. 19–20), falling roughly in the center of the composition, and once in the concluding line (v. 31). The phrase “her palms” appears three times and the singular “her palm” once: these phrases occur twice in the first half of the poem (vv. 13, 16) and twice in the mirror structure (vv. 19–20).^{Footnote 33}

The Poem’s Message in the Alphabetic Acrostic

The most compelling description of the woman’s active hands in the poem comes at the placement of the mirror pattern in vv. 19–20. Here, the theme of “hands,” woven through the fabric of the poem, is folded seamlessly into the alphabetic acrostic, one of the poem’s structuring devices. In the alphabetic scheme, vv. 19 and 20 open with sequential letters, yod and kaf, letters whose names correspond precisely to the initial words of the poetic units themselves: ידיה, “her hands,” and כפה, “her palm.” The mirrored arrangement of these verses fuses the precise focus of the poem’s praise—the generative nature of the woman’s skill—with the alphabetic acrostic:

The content of the mirror pattern in vv. 19–20 highlights a division in the content of the poem as well.^{Footnote 35} One might thematically divide the poem as follows:

1. I. vv. 10–12

2. Introductory statement of the acquisition of אשׁת חיל and her praiseworthy qualities

3. II. vv. 13–19

4. Productive action benefiting the household and its survival

5. III. vv. 20–29

6. Productive action increasing the reputation of the household

7. IV. vv. 30–31

8. The subordination of beauty to wisdom

As detailed above, the first half of the mirror pattern, v. 19, describes generative action beneficial for the woman’s own continued productivity and accumulation of wealth: her hands are engaged in the task of shaping raw materials to produce cloth. Likewise, the section that v. 19 concludes, vv. 13–18, describes productive action centered on the subsistence of her family: preparing materials for cloth production (v. 13); feeding her household (vv. 14–15); establishing a transgenerational source of wealth (v. 16). She demonstrates strength (v. 17) and determination (v. 18) to continue producing. Verse 19, with its resumption of the theme of cloth production, thus forms an inclusio with the beginning of the section at v. 13.^{Footnote 36}

The second half of the mirror pattern, v. 20, describes actions that reach beyond subsistence, to the development of one’s reputation in the community: her hands reach out to the economically marginalized.^{Footnote 37} Along these lines, the second half of the woman’s activities in the poem, vv. 21–29, describe productive actions that build her reputation within the family and without: both she and her family are well dressed (vv. 21–22); her husband establishes a reputation (v. 23); she engages in trade (v. 24); she establishes herself as sufficiently knowledgeable to offer instruction (v. 26); she observes the correct behavior of those in her household, and the quality of her products is a testament to this (v. 27); her children and her husband speak praise (v. 28), and in their words (v. 29) she has not only lived up to her moniker, “a valiant woman,” she has exceeded it.

The mirror pattern in vv. 19–20 outlines this thematic division in the description of the woman’s activities. Other repetitions between sections reinforce the division between the description of actions benefiting the survival of her household (vv. 13–19) and the description of actions going beyond survival, toward the development of good reputation (vv. 20–29). The “bread” of v. 14 that she brings from afar, and the food she gives to her household in v. 15 is, in the second half of the poem, not only sustenance but a mark of the quality of the production of the household: “She observes the ways of her household, she does not eat the bread of idleness.” In the first half of the poem, in v. 17, she girds herself “with strength,” but in the second half of the poem the very qualities of strength and splendor have become her clothing, that is, her externally observed characteristics. Whereas in the first half of the poem (v. 17) she girds herself, in the second half (v. 24) she has a surplus girdle to sell to a merchant.

Further, the mirror pattern in vv. 19–20 highlights the subtle shift in the woman’s activities in the first and second halves of the description: from those enabling the survival of her household to those indicating her social success beyond mere subsistence. The poem’s structural features—the repeated mention of her hands and the integration of this theme into the alphabetic acrostic—render the praise of the woman’s handiwork a primary focus. Unlike the praise of Sarai’s beauty in Genesis Apocryphon, Prov 31:10–31 describes the woman only for her actions; any mention of her body—her hands and, in v. 26, her mouth—is subordinate to these actions. In this ideal depiction of a woman with the correct attitude, her hands are instruments of successful action, and her mouth functions solely to articulate instruction for others to succeed. Perhaps the reformulation of the praise-through-description plays on the semantics of the term חכמה itself. The term designates both the skill of one’s hands, that is, an artisan (Bezalel, for example), and the skill of speech and knowledge, that is, articulating correct action.

Decoupling Beauty and Wisdom

In biblical narrative, wisdom and beauty are frequently represented as divine gifts, and sometimes these qualities are observed by narrators together.^{Footnote 38} In Daniel, wisdom is described alongside beauty. In Daniel 1, the king orders his chief officer to bring Israelites of royal descent and nobility:^{Footnote 39} “Youths without a single blemish, of fair appearance, intelligent in every skill, knowledgeable and discerning.” What connects beauty and wisdom in such narratives? One might posit that these qualities are listed together because they are both external manifestations of divine favor. Similarly, Abigail is described in 1 Sam 25:3 as “intelligent and beautiful.” Intellectual capacity and beauty, at least in these stories, are not the same.^{Footnote 40} They are distinct characteristics that manifest differently from one another. But beauty and wisdom share one specific quality: they are both divine gifts, natural to those who possess them.^{Footnote 41}

Bezalel’s חכמה (“wisdom, skill”), along with the skill of others, is explicitly described as a divine gift.^{Footnote 42} In Gen 39, Joseph is successful because, as the narrator tells us, others observed that “Yahweh was with him”: his wisdom is attributed to divine favor. In Dan 1:17, Daniel’s and his friends’ wisdom is described explicitly as a divine gift. The praise poem, which Daniel utters after the mystery of the king’s dream, is revealed in Dan 2:20–23 prioritizes a statement attributing wisdom and agency ultimately belonging to God and only available to Daniel as a result of a divine gift. In 1 Kgs 3, Solomon is offered a gift of his choice from the deity. Solomon admits the limitations of his competence and age, as well as the enormity of the task before him, and asks for wisdom of the most basic sense: “an attentive mind,” capable of hearing legal disputes, whose primary function is “to distinguish between good and bad.”^{Footnote 43} God tells Solomon that because he had selected well, he will be rewarded, “according to his request,” with superior knowledge—“a wise and discerning mind”—and the deity then articulates the uniqueness of Solomon’s intellectual gifts.^{Footnote 44}

Yet in Proverbs, understanding and discernment are not inborn qualities but skills acquired through a process. These skills, according to the various instructions, are developed through attentiveness to instruction and its discipline. This process is advertised by the work’s frame itself, in Prov 1:1–22:16 and its conclusion in Prov 31:10–31.^{Footnote 45} Even those who possess wisdom have yet skills to acquire, according to Prov 1:5: “The wise one will hear (instruction) and will pile on teaching(s), the discerning one will acquire strategies.”

If a single overarching message can be teased out of the book of Proverbs and its manifold, often contradictory instructions for and observations of human behavior and the world, this message is that wisdom is acquired.^{Footnote 46} This is not, of course, to deny that wisdom is described as a divine gift throughout Proverbs, or that wisdom is transmitted through parental instruction.^{Footnote 47} Rather, the point is that in its various calls to readers, Proverbs implores its audience to attend to its discourse and through it to acquire wisdom. This message, that wisdom is acquired through attentiveness to the words of the work itself, forms a basic argument for the work’s ontology, a necessary articulation for the book’s self-justification. Why else attend to its words if through them one cannot acquire wisdom? One might therefore read the concluding poem in Prov 31:10–31 as a final call to value the willed acquisition of wisdom over other divine gifts that one need not work toward, like beauty. Wisdom, through this perspective, is a set of skills acquired through fidelity to a humble outlook that devotes itself to the system of cause and effect and the limitations placed on human knowledge, i.e., “the fear of Yahweh.”

Yet in Prov 31:10–31, “wisdom” as an abstract category makes a seemingly unremarkable appearance. The woman described is not personified Wisdom of Proverbs 1–9. Her tasks are performed skillfully, but they are all too human, all too pedestrian to be within the purview of Woman Wisdom, who tells the reader in Proverbs 8 that she was with God at creation.^{Footnote 48} In v. 31 when חכמה, “wisdom,” emerges from the woman’s mouth, it is in parallel with her “instruction of devotion.” Here, “wisdom” is explicitly speech and, in the progress of the woman’s development through action, something that advises others on their actions. The poem’s focus is on deeds and their contribution to success. Wisdom is the verbal instruction of these skills, to others, which follows the success of these deeds. It is an entire system of correct attitude and skill acquisition that is being described and praised in the poem, and it is this system of correct attitude and generative skill that the poem prioritizes over beauty. In selecting virtues, that one should select the system of wisdom-acquisition over beauty is a statement of the relative value of these two categories. Is beauty still configured here as a divine gift? No such statement is offered: the nature of beauty is not theorized other than as a statement cautioning against its preference. Beauty is, however, distinguished from wisdom and its benefits: while beauty has no lasting effects, correct, effective actions build upon one another, leading ultimately to one’s praise.

The book of Proverbs is framed as advice addressed to young men. Likewise, the alphabetic acrostic in Prov 31:10–31 seems to be addressed to an audience other than those who would model themselves after this woman.^{Footnote 49} Based on its opening in v. 10, “A valiant wife, that one might acquire!” and its conclusion, the poem appears to be addressed to young men who would be in a position to make such a choice. Thus the poem is not only a praise of the poem’s subject and her actions.^{Footnote 50} The poem is also a praise of the correct attitude in making choices. In this sense, the ideal to be emulated is identical in Ps 1 and Prov 31:10–31. In both poems, the ideal man selects a “correct path”—whether this path is the general “instruction of Yahweh” (Ps 1:2) or a wife whose primary quality is the specific, disciplining aspect of the educational process, “Fear of Yahweh.”^{Footnote 51} One might conclude that Prov 31:10–31 is a praise of the “happy man” who makes correct choices. This praise, however, is disguised by a more encompassing layer of the praise of the feminine subject of the poem, which takes the form of description of the woman’s deeds. And as we have seen, praise-through-description, particularly that of a woman, seems to be associated with a judgment of the subject’s surpassing beauty and assumed worthiness.

Thus, it is possible to read the poem superficially as advice to young men on how to choose a wife properly: one should select a wife who adheres to the guiding assumption of the system of cause and effect, learning from mistakes and remaining in “fear” of the punishment that inevitably follows missteps. This reading, however, would disregard the poem’s place as the conclusion to the book of Proverbs—a bookend to a curated anthology of knowledge of proper behavior and cultivated wisdom. To this end, the poem articulates the nature of abstract categories and defines the relationship between these categories.^{Footnote 52}

In v. 30, beauty is identified as an abstract category and diminished as a virtue: it is deceptive and short lived. This redefinition of beauty reconnects the poem with various negative depictions of women (adulteresses) in Proverbs 1–9 whose attractiveness is seductive, yet this attractiveness conceals their danger.^{Footnote 53} While personified Woman Wisdom and her virtues are described in Proverbs 1–9,^{Footnote 54} no balancing illustrations of positive human women are offered. Proverbs 31:10–31 provides the positive human counterpoint to these depictions and balances the gap created by the depictions of Proverbs 1–9.^{Footnote 55} More to the point, the concluding statement on beauty renders this category subordinate to another virtue: not “wisdom” exactly but rather the system of wisdom-acquisition as a whole.

In its very form, the poem in Prov 31:10–31 plays on the values embedded in the rhetorical device of totalizing description—praises of bodily perfection, such as those found in Song 4:1–7 or of Sarai in the Genesis Apocryphon. The alphabetic acrostic concluding Proverbs plays on the form of the totalizing description in order to decouple beauty from wisdom. Using the literary device through which beauty is exemplified as passive and innate, Prov 31:10–31 promotes active, honed skill in its stead. In the broadest sense, the poem can be read as a summary statement of Proverbs’s epistemology. As Prov 4:7 states, the skill of knowledge is acquired, not bestowed: “The first part of wisdom is—acquire wisdom!” Wisdom is honed through attentiveness to the instructions of the anthology themselves. It is therefore surprising, in light of the reading presented here, that Solomon—the biblical character most gifted in wisdom—would frame Proverbs, a book on the acquisition of wisdom, as wisdom’s literary patron.