There is a decision in front of you that you cannot see past. A job, a move, a person, a diagnosis. Both options are defensible, the people who love you disagree with each other, and nobody can tell you which one is right. This week the Old Testament hands you two books written by people who thought hard about exactly that, and they do not say the same thing.

Proverbs says the path can be known. Live wisely, listen to correction, keep your word, guard your heart, and life will mostly go well: "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths" (Proverbs 3:5–6). That is the promise the week takes its name from, and it is worth noticing how little of Proverbs is mystical. Most of it is a father at a table telling a son what he has watched happen to people — the ones who kept their tempers and the ones who did not, the ones who could be trusted with money and the ones who could not.

Ecclesiastes says he tried that, and it was like holding smoke. A man with every resource pursued pleasure, work, learning and wealth, and reported back that all of it was "vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2) — a Hebrew word that means breath, the thing you cannot hold in your hand. He is not a cynic. He is someone who wanted the truth more than he wanted comfort, and he is honest that the promise did not always come true where he could see it.

Both books are scripture, and they sit in the same week on purpose. They are not a contradiction to be solved. They are the two halves of an honest life of faith — a God who directs paths, and a world where you often cannot see the path while you are standing on it. If you have ever done everything right and had it go wrong anyway, Ecclesiastes was written for you, and it is in your Bible.

Both books are collections rather than stories, so this table maps them by what each part is doing, not by plot. Assigned chapters are in bold, and every chapter is discussed below.

Proverbs 1–4 — the long argument before the sayings begin — assigned

Most people meet Proverbs as a bin of one-liners. The first nine chapters are not that. They are a sustained address from a parent to a child on the edge of adult life, and the assigned chapters are nearly half of it.

Chapter 1 states the book's purpose out loud, then gives its thesis: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction" (1:7). That word fear, in this setting, includes reverence: the posture of someone who knows they are not the largest thing in the room — and Proverbs says everything else in the book depends on it.

Then something strange happens. Wisdom becomes a woman standing in the street shouting. She is not hidden in a school or a temple; she is "in the chief place of concourse" (1:21), competing for attention in a marketplace. Wisdom in this book is not obscure. It is ignored.

Chapter 2 answers the obvious objection — if it is out in public, why is it so hard to get? Because the terms are steep: "if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures" (2:4). Both are true at once — freely offered, and expensive.

Chapter 3 is the one the week is named for, and it is worth slowing down. "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding" (3:5). The second half is the hard half and it is the half usually skipped. Trusting God is comfortable; not leaning on your own understanding means acting when you cannot see why. And the next line, "In all thy ways acknowledge him," is in Hebrew "in all thy ways know him" — the verb is yāḏaʿ (יָדַע), a broad word for knowing or acknowledging. Here its object is God: a relationship carried into our decisions, not merely a nod before making them.

The chapter also says something people find hard: "whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth" (3:12). Hebrews 12:5–6 quotes those two verses and applies them directly to us — correction as evidence of belonging, not of rejection.

Chapter 4 is a father quoting his own father — "he taught me also, and said unto me" (Proverbs 4:4) — three generations in one paragraph. Its most quoted line is "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life" (4:23), and its loveliest is a picture of what a wise life looks like from the outside: "the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day" (4:18). Not a flash. A sunrise.

Proverbs 5–9 — the rest of the address, and Wisdom at the creation — not assigned

Chapters 5 through 7 are blunt warnings to a young man about adultery, debt and the company he keeps. They are frank in a way that surprises readers who think the Old Testament is genteel.

Chapter 8 is the one to know about. Wisdom speaks again, and says she was there before the world: "When he prepared the heavens, I was there" (8:27). Early Christians read this chapter Christologically, and it shaped how the New Testament speaks of Christ as the wisdom of God. If you read only one unassigned chapter this week, read Proverbs 8.

And some Latter-day Saint scholars have asked a further question about that figure. Wisdom in Proverbs 8 is consistently she — a woman present at the creation, speaking in her own voice — and a number of writers have explored whether the passage preserves something of a divine feminine, and how that might relate to what we teach about a Mother in Heaven. Nothing here is doctrine and this guide is not making the claim; the reading is offered because readers meet the chapter and notice the pronoun. If you want to follow it further, three places to start:

• Mother in Heaven — the Church's own Gospel Topics essay, and the right place to begin, because it sets out what is actually taught and what is not.
• "A Mother There": A Survey of Historical Teachings about Mother in Heaven — David L. Paulsen and Martin Pulido, BYU Studies Quarterly 50:1. A survey of what has been said across the Restoration, with the sources.
• "Zion" and "Jerusalem" as Lady Wisdom in Moses 7 and Nephi's Tree of Life Vision — Interpreter Foundation, on the personified-Wisdom figure and where it surfaces in Restoration scripture.

Word Studies, study 1 explains the unusual plural form for Wisdom at Proverbs 1:20. Chapter 8 uses the ordinary singular form; neither form alone settles the identity of the personified figure.

Chapter 9 closes the address with two dinner invitations — Wisdom's and Folly's, both calling to the same passers-by, with the same words. The offer looks identical from the street. Only the outcome differs.

Proverbs 15–16 — inside the collection — assigned

At chapter 10 the book changes shape: hundreds of two-line sayings, most of them contrasts. The assigned pair sits in the middle of that collection and shows what it does well.

Chapter 15 opens with a line most people know without knowing where it is from: "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger" (15:1). Try it this week and it is a fair test of the whole book — Proverbs claims to describe how life actually works, and that one is checkable by Friday.

Chapter 16 holds the sentence that keeps Proverbs honest and quietly prepares you for Ecclesiastes: "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps" (16:9). You plan. He directs. The book that most insists on planning also says the plan is not the last word — and it says so sixteen chapters before Ecclesiastes says it louder.

It is also where "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall" (16:18) lives, usually misquoted as "pride goeth before a fall," which loses the parallel line.

Proverbs 10–14, 17–21, 23–30 — the sayings you are not assigned — not assigned

These chapters are the bulk of the book and they resist summary on purpose. A few things worth knowing about what you are skipping:

They are observations, not promises. "The hand of the diligent maketh rich" (10:4) is how life generally runs — not a guarantee with God's signature on it. Proverbs states the pattern; it does not sign a contract, and Ecclesiastes is in this same week to say so out loud. Read the collection this way and its famous lines stop indicting people whose lives did not follow the rule. The most-quoted of them, "Train up a child in the way he should go" (22:6), belongs to an assigned chapter and is treated below, with its full treatment in Historical & Cultural Context, section 1.

Proverbs 25:1 tells you how the book was made: "These are also proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah copied out." Scribes, two centuries after Solomon, preserving an older collection. The book says so itself.

Chapter 30 names Agur as its speaker. His identity is uncertain, but his numbered riddles — "there be three things... yea, four" — give this part of the collection a distinctive voice.

Proverbs 22 — and the turn at verse 17 — assigned

The chapter opens in the collection's usual voice, then at 22:17 the heading changes: "the words of the wise." A new section of the book begins in the middle of a chapter — the seam between two collections runs straight through 22, so the chapter you are assigned is half of one thing and half of another.

Proverbs 22:6 calls parents to teach with a lifetime in view: "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." For parents waiting through a child's wandering, it can be a source of hope, not a verdict on their efforts. Historical & Cultural Context, section 1 explores that comfort alongside the prodigal son's return, while respecting a child's agency.

Proverbs 31 — the mother's instruction, and the alphabet poem — assigned

Two things sit in this chapter and most readers only meet the second.

Verses 1–9 are a queen mother teaching her son to rule. King Lemuel is quoting his mother, and her advice is political: do not waste yourself on wine or women, and "open thy mouth for the dumb" (31:8) — a king's first duty is to those with no voice.

Verses 10–31 are an acrostic — twenty-two verses running aleph to tav, a shape the King James does not show you. How the form works, and why it matters that a whole alphabet is spent on one woman's working life, is in the Historical & Cultural Context, section 5; the study library's Alef-Bet and Psalm 119 map lays the letters out one by one.

The poem praises strength expressed through work, generosity and wisdom. Key Passages, passage 5 explains the expression "virtuous woman" and its connection with Ruth.

Near its end, the poem names what it values: "Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised" (31:30). The same fear of the LORD the book opened with, thirty chapters later, in a woman's hands.

Ecclesiastes 1–3 — the man who tried everything — assigned

Now the week turns, and the turn is deliberate.

Chapter 1 introduces a speaker called Qoheleth — "the Preacher," or more nearly the one who gathers an assembly — and his verdict arrives in the second verse: "Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 1:2).

That word appears five times in that one verse. It is heḇel (הֶבֶל), literally vapour or breath, also used figuratively for vanity or futility. Word Studies, study 2 explores that range. If you met Psalm 62 two weeks ago you met the same word: everything else, weighed on the scales, comes out "lighter than vanity."

Chapter 2 is an experiment with a control. He tries pleasure, then great works — houses, vineyards, pools, servants — then wealth, then wisdom itself, and reports the result each time. He is not guessing. He ran it. And the finding is that death flattens the ledger: the wise man and the fool arrive at the same place, and whatever you built goes to someone who did not build it.

Chapter 3 is the most famous passage in the book and the least understood, because most people know it from a song: "To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven" (Ecclesiastes 3:1). It is usually read as serenity. In context it is closer to limitation — you do not choose the season, and the list includes a time to kill, to break down, to hate, to make war.

Then comes the line that changes the book. "He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh" (3:11). The word behind "the world" is ʿôlām (עוֹלָם) — eternity. God put eternity inside people who live inside time. That is why the mismatch aches — not because life is meaningless, but because we were built for something the day cannot hold.

Ecclesiastes 4–10 — the middle you are not assigned — not assigned

The unassigned middle is where Qoheleth looks at oppression with no comforter (Ecclesiastes 4:1), at the man with no one to help him up (4:10), at money that never satisfies the one who loves it (5:10), and at the fact that the race is not always to the swift (9:11).

It is the hardest stretch of the Old Testament for many readers, and skipping it makes chapter 12 land wrong. The conclusion is earned by this middle. Without it, "fear God and keep his commandments" sounds glib; with it, it sounds like a man who checked everything else first.

Ecclesiastes 11–12 — sow anyway, and remember now — assigned

Chapter 11 is the practical answer to the whole book, and it is not what a reader braced for despair expects. "Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days" (Ecclesiastes 11:1). Then: sow in the morning and in the evening, "for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that" (11:6).

Not knowing which one works is not a reason to sow nothing. It is a reason to sow both. That is Ecclesiastes' answer to the decision you cannot see past — and it is startlingly close to Proverbs, arrived at from the opposite direction.

Chapter 12 opens with the one thing Qoheleth asks of the young: "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth" (12:1). What follows is one of the great poems about growing old, written almost entirely in images — the keepers of the house tremble, the grinders cease, the almond tree flourishes, the silver cord is loosed.

And then the book stops arguing: "Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man" (12:13).

Which is where Proverbs started. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge." Proverbs opens there. Ecclesiastes gets there the long way, having tried everything else.

"Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding."

— Proverbs 3:5

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart,

so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end."

— Ecclesiastes 3:11

Put those two beside each other and the week's argument is complete. Proverbs says do not lean on your own understanding. Ecclesiastes explains why you cannot: eternity is set in your heart and the whole work is not visible from where you stand.

The instruction and the reason, in two books that never mention each other.

1. A parent begs a child to choose wisdom while the choice is still open (Prov 1–4).
2. Wisdom is not hidden — she is shouting in the street and being ignored (1:20–21).
3. The promise is given: trust, do not lean on your own understanding, and He will make your

paths level (Proverbs 3:5–6).

1. The sayings begin, and among them the line that keeps the promise honest: you plan, He

directs (16:9).

1. The book ends on a woman of valour, spending the whole alphabet on an ordinary working

life lived in the fear of the LORD (31:10–31).

1. Then a second voice says he tried it all and could not hold any of it (Eccl 1–2).
2. He names the ache and its cause: eternity, set in a heart that lives inside time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
3. And his answer is not despair but sowing — in the morning and the evening, because you do

not know which will prosper (Ecclesiastes 11:6).

1. Both books end in the same place, from opposite ends: fear God, and keep His commandments.

You are allowed to say it out loud when life does not add up. Ecclesiastes is in the canon. A book that says "all is vapour" and "the race is not to the swift" was kept, copied and read aloud in worship. If your faith has ever had to survive a season where nothing made sense, this week tells you that experience has a place in scripture — not as a failure of belief, but as part of it.

And the famous verse is worth testing on something real. Take one decision you are actually carrying this week — not a hypothetical one — and read Proverbs 3:5–6 against it honestly. Ask what you are currently resting your weight on. Most of us find an answer we did not expect, and finding it is the point.

Proverbs is a description of the world, not a contract with God. Read as promises, these sayings break faithful people — the parent who trained up a child who left, the honest worker who was not rewarded. Read as Proverbs means them, they are the shape life mostly takes, and they are worth building on because a pattern is not a guarantee and both books say so.

And the answer to a decision you cannot see past is in Ecclesiastes 11:6. Sow in the morning and in the evening, because you do not know which will prosper. Not certainty, and not paralysis. Faithful action without a guarantee — which is the only kind most of us are ever offered, and which is, in the end, what trusting Him with all your heart actually looks like.

Most of the Old Testament is one of two things. Law tells you what God requires. Prophecy tells you what God is saying now. This week you are in neither.

Wisdom literature is the Bible's third voice, and it does something the other two do not: it watches how life actually goes and reports back. It does not usually say "thus saith the LORD." It says "a soft answer turneth away wrath" — go and see whether that is true.

That is why Proverbs reads like advice from someone who has been paying attention for forty years, and why Ecclesiastes reads like a man arguing with himself. They are not less inspired for it. They are inspired in a different register — the register of a parent at a kitchen table rather than a prophet on a mountain.

And it changes how you read them — and it changes 22:6 specifically, which more parents return to than any other verse in the book. "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Read in its own register, this verse is one of the most comforting sentences in scripture, and it is worth saying plainly why.

For a parent whose child has wandered, the words "when he is old" invite a longer view. A child's present choices are not the whole story, nor are they a simple measure of a parent's faithfulness. The teaching, example and love offered at home can continue to matter through years when their influence is difficult to see.

The Hebrew phrase behind "in the way he should go" can be translated "according to his way." Readers differ over whether it emphasises the right way to live or instruction suited to the particular child. The phrase alone does not settle that question. Both readings invite parents to teach faithfully and to attend carefully to the child in front of them.

Christ's parable of the prodigal son gives a vivid companion picture (Luke 15:11–32). The son leaves, misuses his inheritance and eventually remembers his father's household. When he returns, his father runs to welcome him. The story gives us reason to hope in repentance and reunion; it does not tell us that a parent can control a child's agency or predict when a return will come.

Faithful teaching is worth continuing even when its fruit is not yet visible. Read beside the prodigal son's homecoming, Proverbs 22:6 can comfort parents who are waiting: the years of love and teaching need not be dismissed as wasted, and wandering need not be the end of the story.

Both books are associated with Solomon, and the association is old and serious. But the books themselves tell you they were compiled, and they are not shy about it.

Proverbs names at least four sources inside its own pages:

That is a book that shows its work. The Old Testament rarely tells you how a book was made; Proverbs does it four times.

The references to Solomon and Hezekiah span centuries. Solomon reigned in the 10th century BC by the traditional chronology; Hezekiah's scribes were copying two hundred and fifty years later, in the late 8th or early 7th century BC; and Agur and Lemuel are undated voices folded in alongside them. The book took generations to reach the shape you are reading.

Ecclesiastes presents its speaker as "the son of David, king in Jerusalem" (Ecclesiastes 1:1) but never uses the name Solomon. Its Hebrew has features that many scholars associate with a later period — some place the Hebrew text's final form as late as the Persian era, several centuries after Solomon. What the book claims for itself is a voice, not a byline — a king who had every resource and spent it finding out what lasts. Whether the voice is Solomon's own or a later writer speaking in his character, the book asks to be read as his testimony either way.

On King Lemuel, and a name that turns up somewhere unexpected

Lemuel appears in the Hebrew Bible only in this one chapter — twice, at 31:1 and 31:4. The King James calls his mother's teaching a "prophecy." Some translations instead read the Hebrew as a place name and call him "king of Massa." Genesis 25:14 lists Massa among Ishmael's sons. That alternative has led some readers to suggest an Arabian setting, but the identification is uncertain. The Come Follow Me manual for this week does not settle his nationality, but it does describe the woman of 31:10–31 as "a woman of great spiritual strength, capability, and influence" — which is the reading the Hebrew supports.

Rashi, the eleventh-century Jewish commentator, identifies him differently — as Solomon, with Bathsheba as the mother giving the counsel (see this week's Key Passages for the fuller treatment). Both readings exist in Jewish tradition; scripture itself does not settle which.

A reader may well wonder whether there is a connection to the Lemuel of the Book of Mormon — Lehi's second son, one of the two brothers named beside a valley their father hoped would make him "firm and steadfast" (1 Nephi 2:10). Worth noticing, and stated as exactly that — worth noticing, not proven: Lemuel occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible outside Proverbs 31, and Massa is listed among the sons of Ishmael (Genesis 25:14), an Arabian people. That is a different Ishmael from the one whose household joins Lehi's family in 1 Nephi 7 — Nephi's Ishmael lives in Jerusalem, and the guide is not claiming a link between them. Nor is any claim made about Lehi's route: where exactly the family travelled, and whether it passed through Massa's territory, is not something this guide has established. The text never says Lehi named his son for the king in Proverbs, and this guide will not claim more than the parallel supports. But a name attested nowhere else in the Bible, turning up in a Book of Mormon family with Arabian connections, is the kind of detail worth sitting with rather than passing over.

None of this is a problem for the books' authority, and Latter-day Saints have less trouble with it than most: we are used to scripture that shows its own making. Nephi writes "I make a record in the language of my father" (1 Nephi 1:2), and fifteen verses later, of the very same work, "I make an abridgment of the record of my father" (1 Nephi 1:17) — one writer, telling you plainly that he is both recording and condensing. Compilation is not corruption. It is how a covenant people keeps what it has been given.

Proverbs is not one thing. It has a shape, and the reading assignment follows it.

Chapters 1–9 are a sustained address — a parent speaking to a child on the edge of adult life, in long paragraphs, with wisdom personified as a woman calling in the street. You are assigned four of those nine.

Chapters 10–29 are the collections — hundreds of short sayings, most of them two lines that contrast: "A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger." You are assigned three chapters out of twenty, which is enough to learn the form.

Chapters 30–31 are appendices in other voices — Agur's riddles, and King Lemuel's mother. You are assigned the second.

A new collection begins within one of your assigned chapters. At 22:17, "the words of the wise" introduces a section that continues into chapter 24. Knowing this helps explain why the later part of chapter 22 reads differently from the short sayings before it.

Why translations differ at 22:20. The King James has "Have not I written to thee excellent

things" — and here is what lies behind that phrase.

Hebrew scribes preserved two readings here, and many Hebrew editions show both. The word written in the manuscripts — scholars call it the kəṯîḇ (כְּתִיב), "what is written" — is šilšôm (שִׁלְשׁוֹם), which points toward "formerly."

The word the tradition directs you to read aloud — the qərê (קְרֵי), "what is read" — is šālîšîm (שָׁלִישִׁים). That is what stands behind the King James's "excellent things." Other translations adopt "thirty sayings," which is why the passage is often compared with other ancient collections of thirty sayings. The Hebrew text of Proverbs 22:20 displays the written and read forms side by side.

And these are genuinely different spellings, not one spelling with different vowels.

That distinction matters: it means the scribes were preserving two traditions of the text,

not merely two ways of pronouncing one. They kept both rather than choosing — which is the

preservation of disagreement discussed in Jewish Perspective, section 1.

The Jewish Publication Society's note on this verse says that the meaning of the Hebrew

is uncertain.

Why "thirty" is the interesting one, not just a curiosity: the passage running from here

through 24:22 is widely noted among scholars of the ancient Near East for resembling the FORM

of other international instructional writing from the period — see section 6, on wisdom as

a genre Israel shared with its neighbours.

You do not need to resolve any of this to read the chapter. It is here because a reader who

checks another translation will find something different and deserves to know why, not to

leave them guessing which reading is "correct."

Neither English title is what the book calls itself in Hebrew.

Proverbs opens "Mišlê Šᵊlōmô" (מִשְׁלֵי שְׁלֹמֹה) — "the proverbs of Solomon" — and Jewish tradition names the whole book simply Mišlê, Mishlei, from the same opening word. māšāl (מָשָׁל) is a wider term than the English "proverb" suggests — it covers a short saying, but also a parable, a taunt, or an extended comparison. Solomon's proverbs are the narrow case of a wider Hebrew category.

The Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, opens Proverbs with Paroimiai (Παροιμίαι), its word for sayings or comparisons. The Latin Vulgate opens with parabolae Salomonis, "sayings of Solomon." These are translations, not simply the Hebrew title written in another alphabet. Our title Proverbs likewise names a kind of saying; the Hebrew category is broader than a collection of short maxims.

Qoheleth — the Speaker Who Addresses an Assembly

The speaker calls himself qōheleṯ (קֹהֶלֶת), often written Qoheleth. The title is related to gathering an assembly and can suggest someone who addresses it. The King James chooses "the Preacher"; other translations use "the Teacher." No single English title captures every possibility.

English readers get the name through Greek. The Septuagint rendered Qoheleth as Ekklēsiastēs, from ekklēsia, "assembly." That is where "Ecclesiastes" comes from, and it is also the root behind ecclesiastical. (Our word church travelled a different road — see the Word Studies, study 4.)

The book's sacred status was debated in Jewish tradition. The discussion, and the ritual language it uses, are explained in Jewish Perspective, section 1.

Proverbs 31:10–31 is an acrostic — a poem whose lines begin with the successive letters of the alphabet, in order. Twenty-two verses, each one starting with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph through tav.

If you studied Psalm 119 last week, this is the same device — and the comparison is worth a moment. Psalm 119 spends all twenty-two letters, eight verses each, on the word of God. Proverbs 31 spends all twenty-two on one woman's working life. The form says: this is the whole of it, A to Z, nothing left out.

And the King James does not show you. Unlike Psalm 119, where your Bible prints ALEPH, BETH, GIMEL above the stanzas, Proverbs 31 gives no such headings. The structure is entirely invisible in English — which is a good argument for knowing it is there.

The phrase everything turns on is mistranslated by time, not by the translators. "Virtuous woman" (31:10) is ʾēšet ḥayil (אֵשֶׁת חַיִל), and ḥayil is a strength word — force, might, an army. It is what the Old Testament calls able soldiers and men of valour. In 1611 "virtuous" still carried that sense of strength; four centuries later it has narrowed to mean well-behaved. The poem describes a woman who buys a field, plants a vineyard, runs a household economy and laughs at the future. "Woman of valour" is closer to what it says.

Wisdom was an international trade. Egypt, Mesopotamia and Canaan all produced collections of practical instruction — a father teaching a son how to speak to superiors, handle money, and keep his word — and some of them are older than Israel's monarchy.

Proverbs does not hide the overlap. It builds it in. Agur (30:1) and King Lemuel (31:1) are named as voices the book never identifies as Israelite, and their material was kept — though Jewish tradition reads both as Solomon himself. Their uncertain identities do not, by themselves, establish a foreign origin.

What Israel did with the shared genre is the interesting part. The nations around them tied wisdom to the favour of the gods and the order of the state. Proverbs ties it to one relationship: "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge" (1:7), and again at the very end, in the next-to-last verse of the acrostic — "a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be praised" (31:30). Same phrase, first chapter and last. Everything between them sits inside it.

(Scholars have long compared particular passages in Proverbs with Egyptian instruction texts — a well-established discussion, and a thread worth pulling if the subject interests you.)

A word that travelled, and where "philosophy" comes from

The Hebrew word for wisdom is ḥāḵmâ (חָכְמָה) — see Word Studies, Word Study 1, for the full treatment. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek in the centuries before Christ (the Septuagint, see section 7), ḥāḵmâ was rendered sophia (σοφία) — the ordinary Greek word for wisdom, and the word the New Testament itself uses for the same idea.

And "philosophy" is built directly on it. Greek philosophia (φιλοσοφία) is philos (φίλος, "lover of, friend to") joined to sophia — "the love of wisdom." The Greek philosophers who coined the term were naming the same pursuit this week's books practise in a different key: not information about the world, but a disciplined love of understanding it rightly. Proverbs 4:5–7 could be read as advice from the same family: "Get wisdom, get understanding… wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom."

The Text

7 The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and

instruction.

How the Passage Works

Everything else in Proverbs is downstream of this verse. It is the book's thesis, placed in its seventh line, and the previous Come, Follow Me cycle used it as the title for this exact block of chapters.

Two words in it are doing more than English shows.

"Beginning" is rēʾšît (רֵאשִׁית) — the word that opens the Bible. Bərēʾšît bārāʾ ʾĕlōhîm: "In the beginning God created." It means a starting point, and it also means the first and best portion — it is the word for firstfruits, the part of the harvest given first because it is finest. The plain reading is the first: this is where knowledge starts. But the second sense is in the word, and readers have long heard it here — the fear of the LORD as the best of what knowledge has, not only its opening move. Whether 1:7 intends both is a judgement you get to make with the word in front of you. (Proverbs 9:10 says something similar with a different word, təḥillâ (תְּחִלָּה), also meaning beginning. The difference in vocabulary does not by itself prove a difference in teaching.)

And "fear" is the word most likely to lose a reader, because in English it means alarm. Yirʾâ (יִרְאָה) covers a wider range — dread, yes, but also reverence, awe, the response of a small creature to something enormous and good. Here the relationship with the Lord gives the word its setting; the word itself can describe both fear and reverence.

Which reframes the whole book. Proverbs is not saying that frightened people learn faster. It is saying that knowledge has a starting place, and the starting place is knowing what you are and Who He is. Everything practical in the next thirty chapters — money, speech, temper, work, marriage, friendship — is built on that footing, which is why a book so full of ordinary advice opens with a sentence about God.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Elder David A. Bednar, "Therefore They Hushed Their Fears" (April 2015) — a DIRECT TREATMENT, not a thematic parallel. He cites Proverbs 1:7 alongside 15:33 and 16:6 and separates the two

meanings the English word hides: "Unlike worldly fear that creates alarm and anxiety, godly fear is a source of peace, assurance, and confidence." And he answers the objection most readers actually have: "The fear of the Lord is not a reluctant apprehension about coming into His presence to be judged. I do not believe we will be afraid of Him at all." (churchofjesuschrist.org)

• Jacob 4:13 — "the Spirit speaketh the truth… things as they really are, and… as they really

will be." The same claim from the other direction: knowledge begins with seeing what is actually the case, and God is the largest fact in the case.

• The 2022 lesson for these same chapters was titled "The Fear of the Lord Is the Beginning of

Wisdom." That title makes the opening verse a useful starting point for this reading too.

Study Questions

1. What changes if "beginning" also means firstfruits — the first and best?
2. What is the difference between being afraid of God and being in awe of Him?
3. Why would a book about money, temper and speech open with a sentence about God?

The Text

5 Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

6 In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

How the Passage Works

This passage gives the week its title. Read all three movements together: trust the Lord, acknowledge the limits of your own understanding, and look to Him for direction.

"Lean not" is šāʿan (שָׁעַן) — to lean your weight on something, the way you lean on a staff or against a wall. It is not a word about opinions. It is a word about what is holding you up. And what you are told not to lean on is bînâ (בִּינָה) — discernment, insight, the ability to tell one thing from another. Not your ignorance. Your understanding. The verse does not warn you off bad judgement; it warns you off resting your weight on the best judgement you have.

That is a much harder instruction than the one on the plaque, and it is worth noticing that Proverbs — a book that spends thirty-one chapters telling you to get wisdom — puts this near its front. Wisdom is worth everything and it will not bear your weight. Both things are true in the same book, a few chapters apart.

The promise "he shall direct thy paths" uses yāšar (יָשַׁר), a verb that can mean making straight or directing. The image is of a path made straight. It invites trust in God's guidance without requiring us to see every turn ahead. That is an application of the image, not a limit on how God may guide us.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Elder Neil L. Andersen built "Spiritual Whirlwinds" (April 2014) around Helaman 5:12 and the question of

what a person's weight rests on. (Thematic parallel — the talk does not treat Proverbs 3, and it makes the same case about foundations from a Book of Mormon text.)

• D&C 6:36 — "Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear not." The same instruction in

the same order: the looking comes first, and the not-doubting follows from it rather than producing it.

• The manual's theme for this week asks what it means to trust God when the path is unclear.

Verse 6 offers assurance of His direction without spelling out its timing or form.

Study Questions

1. Why would a book devoted to acquiring wisdom warn you against leaning on it?
2. How have you experienced God's guidance when you could not see the whole way ahead?
3. Think of a decision you are carrying. What would "lean not" actually change about it?

The Text

23 Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.

How the Passage Works

Read quickly, this sounds like advice about protecting yourself — guard your feelings, be careful who you let in. The Hebrew is doing something else, and the second half of the verse is what gives it away.

"Issues" is tôṣā'ôt (תּוֹצָאוֹת) — outgoings. It is used elsewhere for the places a border runs out to, and for the source a stream comes from. The heart in this verse is not a vault holding something valuable. It is a spring, and everything downstream tastes of it.

That changes what the guarding is for. You do not guard a spring to keep it safe. You guard it to keep it clean, because whatever gets into it comes out again in every field it waters.

And the phrase translated "with all diligence" is stronger than it looks. It is mišmār (מִשְׁמָר) — a guard post, a watch, the word for a garrison keeping watch on a wall — with the sense above all guarding. Of everything you are keeping watch over, keep watch over this first. A father is telling a son that the interior life is not the private part of a person. It is the part that produces all the rest.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Alma 37:36 — "let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yea, let the affections of thy

heart be placed upon the Lord for ever." Alma is giving Helaman the same instruction Proverbs 4 gives: a father counselling his son about what to guard and where to turn his thoughts.

• Mosiah 4:30 — "watch yourselves, and your thoughts, and your words, and your deeds" — the

order is the order of Proverbs 4:23. Thoughts first, because the rest flows from them.

• A caution worth keeping. This verse is sometimes used to justify withdrawal — guarding the

heart by admitting nothing. The image is a spring, not a wall. A spring that is guarded still flows.

Study Questions

1. What changes if you read the heart as a source rather than as a container?
2. What is actually getting into the spring in an ordinary week of your life?
3. What would it mean to guard something above all other guarding?

The Text

1 A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.

How the Passage Works

Proverbs mostly asks to be believed. This one asks to be tried, and it can be tried this week.

"Soft" is rak (רַךְ) — tender, the word for a young child or for meat that is not tough. Not weak, not evasive. Tender. And "turneth away" is šûb (שׁוּב) in a causative form — causes to turn back. The soft answer does not absorb the anger or endure it. It sends it back the way it came.

The second half is sharper than English suggests. "Grievous words" is a word of pain — ʿeṣeb (עֵצֶב), the same root used for the pain of childbirth in Genesis 3:16. A painful word, not merely a rude one. And what it stirs up is ʾaph (אַף) — literally the nose, and by extension the flare of the nostril that anger produces. Hebrew names the emotion by what it does to a face.

So the verse is a description before it is a command, which is how most of Proverbs works. It is not saying be nice. It is reporting what someone who has watched people closely has observed: tenderness reverses the direction of anger, and painful words raise it. Go and see whether that is true.

Try it this week. The next time someone is sharp with you, answer tenderly — not evasively, tenderly — and watch which direction the conversation moves. Proverbs invites us to notice how its counsel works in experience; it does not guarantee another person's response.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• 3 Nephi 11:29–30 — "he that hath the spirit of contention is not of me" — and the Savior's

remedy is the same: contention is stirred up, and it can be caused to turn back.

• D&C 121:41–43 — "by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness" — followed by

the instruction to reprove "betimes with sharpness" and then show "an increase of love." Gentleness there is not the absence of correction. It is the register the correction is delivered in, which is exactly Proverbs 15:1.

• This is the verse to teach children, because it is the one they can verify themselves before

Sunday.

Study Questions

1. What is the difference between a soft answer and an evasive one?
2. Why might Hebrew name anger after what it does to the face?
3. Try the experiment once this week. What happened?

The Text

10 Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.

25 Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice in time to come.

26 She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.

30 Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the LORD, she shall be

praised.

How the Passage Works

Two facts about this poem change how it reads, and neither is visible in English.

The first is the word translated "virtuous." It is ḥayil (חַיִל), and it is not a domestic word at all. It is a word for strength, force, army, wealth, valour — the word used of soldiers and of standing armies. When the Old Testament calls a man gibbôr ḥayil, the King James gives "mighty man of valour." The same word, applied to a woman, has been translated virtuous for four hundred years. A defensible rendering, and a much smaller one.

There is one other woman in scripture called an ēšet ḥayil — ēšet is the construct form of ʾiššâ (אִשָּׁה), woman or wife. Boaz says it of Ruth on the threshing floor at the end of the harvest (Ruth 3:11), where the King James gives "virtuous woman" again — and he grounds it in something wider than any single act: "all the city of my people doth know." It is her standing in the town. Verse 10 praises the kindness shown in her choice not to pursue younger men. Her care for Naomi is already part of the story (Ruth 2:11). Reading Ruth beside Proverbs 31 gives us a named example of this expression, not proof that the poem was written about her.

The second fact is the shape. Verses 10 through 31 are twenty-two verses long, and each one begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, in order — a poem built on the alphabet, which is what a Hebrew acrostic is. It is the same form as Psalm 119, which you read last week, and it is there for the same reason: an alphabet poem is built to be memorised and carried. This is not a job description. It is something a family could recite.

And the attribution is worth sitting with. Chapter 31 opens "The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him" (Proverbs 31:1). What the text says explicitly is that verses 1–9 — the counsel about wine, judgement and speaking for those with no voice — are hers. The acrostic that follows, verses 10–31, is not separately attributed; it sits under that same heading, and a long reading tradition takes the whole chapter as the mother's teaching.

Both things are worth holding at once. The maternal frame is real and it is the text's own, and the poem's authorship is not stated. It follows a mother's instruction to a king. That placement invites a connection, but does not establish who composed the poem.

And Jewish tradition has a name for that mother. Nobody else in the Old Testament is called Lemuel, and Rashi on Proverbs 31:1 — the eleventh-century commentator whose notes sit beside the Hebrew text in most printed Bibles — identifies him as Solomon. Solomon's mother was Bathsheba (2 Samuel 12:24), and the inference follows: the instruction behind Proverbs 31 is Bathsheba's, given to her son.

Sit with what that would mean. In 2 Samuel 11 Bathsheba has almost no recorded words — four, and they are a message: "I am with child" (2 Samuel 11:5) — the chapter happens to her. By 1 Kings 1–2 she is the gebirah, the queen mother, and the decisive voice securing Solomon's succession. On this reading, the woman scripture first gives almost nothing to say is the woman who supplies the closing chapter of Proverbs — and what she teaches her son is how to recognise strength in a woman.

This is a strand of tradition, not a fact the text states. The Hebrew names Lemuel and does not gloss him, and other readers take him to be a foreign king. Rashi's identification is offered here because it is old, attributable, and worth knowing — not because the chapter settles it.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Ruth 3:11 is the cross-reference to give any class that has heard this chapter used as a

standard. Ruth and Naomi were widows whose security was uncertain. Ruth's faithful action shows that the phrase is not limited to a woman with the resources described in Proverbs 31.

• Proverbs 31:30 is the hinge — "favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain" — and it is the one

verse that brings the twenty-two-verse poem's praise into focus.

• Alphabet acrostics elsewhere in scripture: Psalm 119, Psalm 145, and the first four chapters

of Lamentations. When Hebrew poetry wants a thing remembered whole, it hangs it on the alphabet. (The letters themselves, and what tradition made of them, are in the study-library article on Psalm 119's letter map.)

Study Questions

1. What changes when "virtuous" is read as valour?
2. Why might a poem meant to be memorised be built on the alphabet?
3. How does reading the poem after a mother's counsel affect your understanding of its portrait?

The Text

1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is

planted…

11 He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart,

so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.

How the Passage Works

Most people know verses 1 through 8 and have never read verse 11, which is the one that explains them.

The list of times is not a comfort. Read it again: birth and death, planting and uprooting, killing and healing, weeping and laughing, war and peace. It is a catalogue of a life you do not control, and the point of setting it out in pairs is that both halves arrive whether you arrange them or not.

Verse 11 brings that question into the human heart. The King James reads "he hath set the world in their heart." The Hebrew word, ʿôlām (עוֹלָם), can refer to long duration or eternity. Many translations choose eternity here. On that reading, the verse sets our sense of a larger whole beside our inability to comprehend all of God's work.

God has put eternity into the human heart — and then made us unable to see the whole of what He is doing.

That is the ache the whole book is about, stated in one verse. Not life is meaningless, which is what Ecclesiastes gets accused of. Something far more particular: we were built to want the whole picture and were not given it. The frustration in this book is not the frustration of a cynic. It is the frustration of a creature made for something larger than the view it has been allotted.

And once you have read verse 11, the list of times reads differently. It is not fatalism. It is an honest account of living inside a story whose shape you can feel and cannot see.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Moses 1:10 — "man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed" — and then, three verses

later, "I am a son of God" (Moses 1:13). The same double vision Ecclesiastes 3:11 describes: the smallness and the eternity held together.

• D&C 130:18–19 — intelligence gained in this life "will rise with us in the resurrection."

Ecclesiastes says we cannot see the whole from here. Latter-day revelation does not deny that; it says the view is not permanent.

• Abraham 3:22–23 — the pre-mortal council. A doctrine that gives the ache in verse 11 an origin story: eternity is in the human heart because the human being was there before.

Study Questions

1. How does verse 11 change the way verses 1–8 read?
2. What is the difference between "the world" and "eternity" in the human heart?
3. Ecclesiastes says we cannot see the whole of God's work. Where has that been true for you, and

what did you do with it?

The Text

1 Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not…

13 Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for

this is the whole duty of man.

14 For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good,

or whether it be evil.

How the Passage Works

A man who has spent eleven chapters saying that everything is vapour ends by telling you what to do about it, and the ending is not a retreat. It is the only conclusion the book could honestly reach.

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth" is placed exactly where it does the most work — after the argument, not before it. Anyone can advise a young person to remember God. This is the advice of a man who tried the alternatives first, at scale, with unlimited resources, and came back to report.

And verse 13 has a word in it that is not in the Hebrew. The King James reads "this is the whole duty of man." Open a King James Bible and look: duty is in italics — the translators' honest signal that they supplied it. The Hebrew is kōl hā-ʾādām — two words: kōl (כֹּל), meaning all, or the entirety of something, and ʾādām (אָדָם), meaning man.

"For this is the whole of man."

And that opens a different reading. The whole duty of man is a list of obligations — something you could in principle discharge. The whole of man is a claim about what a person is: after twelve chapters of testing every other candidate — pleasure, work, learning, wealth — what is left of a human being when everything else has been weighed and found to be vapour.

Held as a reading rather than a ruling. That duty is supplied tells you the translators added a word; it does not by itself prove they were wrong to. Hebrew often leaves such a word to be understood, and careful translations still render it as obligation. What the italics give you is permission to ask the question — and the plainer Hebrew, "this is the whole of man," is worth sitting with either way.

And the book does not stop at 13. Verse 14 follows: "For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil." Whichever way you read verse 13, the man who spent twelve chapters saying you cannot see the whole ends by saying Someone can. That is not a retreat from the argument. It is where the argument was going.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• The italics are worth showing a class, because they teach a habit: the King James translators

used italics to identify supplied words, including duty here. A reader who notices italics has been given a tool for the rest of their scripture study.

• Mosiah 2:17 — "when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of

your God" — King Benjamin reaches the same conclusion by the same route, at the end of a life, addressing people he will not see again.

• D&C 88:118 — "seek learning, even by study and also by faith." Ecclesiastes tried learning

by study alone and reported honestly what it could not reach.

Study Questions

1. What changes when "the whole duty of man" becomes "the whole of man"?
2. Why does the instruction to remember God land differently at the end of this book than it would

at the beginning?

1. Ecclesiastes tested pleasure, work, learning and wealth. Which of those are you currently

testing?

Five words carry this week. One of them is the name Ecclesiastes gives itself, and one of them appears five times in a single verse.

The tables. Each study ends with a Cross-Language Connections table following one word through four languages. You need not read any of them — the point is to watch what each translation understood the Hebrew to mean.

Proverbs uses this word more than any other book in the Old Testament, and English readers generally take it to mean being clever about life. The Hebrew is more concrete than that, and its other uses are the giveaway.

ḥāḵmâ (חָכְמָה) is what Exodus calls the skill of the craftsmen who built the tabernacle — the ones God filled "with wisdom of heart" to cut stone and weave cloth. It is competence in a material. A person with ḥāḵmâ knows how a thing actually behaves and works with the grain of it.

That practical use helps us hear Proverbs as instruction for living — how anger moves, what money does to people, how a soft answer actually lands. (Try Proverbs 15:1 this week and see whether the report holds. It is the kind of book that expects to be tested.)

And there is a detail in Proverbs 1:20 that most translations flatten. When Wisdom stops being an attribute and starts being a person — "Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets" — the Hebrew changes word. It is ḥāḵmôṯ (חָכְמוֹת), a separate lexical entry, an intensive or plural form. When she speaks, she gets her own noun.

The personification continues in chapter 8, where Wisdom speaks of being present at creation. That chapter uses the ordinary singular form, so the plural at 1:20 cannot explain the whole portrait by itself. For the passage and further Jewish and Latter-day Saint readings, see the Overview's discussion of Proverbs 8. Those interpretations should be distinguished from what the grammatical form alone establishes.

Cross-Language Connections

Ecclesiastes opens by using one word five times in a single verse. The English keeps the repetition — you can count five vanitys — but it loses the picture.

"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity." (Ecclesiastes 1:2)

Every one of those is heḇel (הֶבֶל) — and underneath every English rendering of it sits a physical image: vapour. Breath. Mist on a cold morning. The thing you can see and cannot hold.

That is worth holding on to, because the English translations reach past it. Vanity in 1611 carried emptiness; modern Bibles print meaningless, futile, fleeting. Those are readings of the image, and defensible ones — but they arrive as a philosophical verdict, where the Hebrew gives you an observation: it was here, you saw it, you reached for it, and your hand closed on nothing. Start from the vapour and decide for yourself what follows from it.

And the construction is a Hebrew superlative. Heḇel haḇālîm — literally vapour of vapours — is the same shape as "holy of holies" and "song of songs." It is the way Hebrew says "the most X there is." The Preacher is not muttering. He is making a formal declaration in the grammar reserved for the highest degree.

One name worth knowing, though the book never makes the connection. Heḇel is also the name of Adam's second son — Abel, whose life was brief and who left nothing behind. Hebrew readers have long noticed. Ecclesiastes does not say so, and neither will we.

Cross-Language Connections

Proverbs 1:2 sets out what the book is for: "To know wisdom and instruction." The second word is gentler in English than it is in Hebrew.

mûsār (מוּסָר) is instruction that corrects — closer to discipline than to teaching. It is the word for what a parent does when a child is going wrong, and it includes the unwelcome part. The King James renders it instruction far more often than anything else — 26 of its 44 tagged uses — and chastisement only three times.

So the book's own statement of purpose is double. Ḥāḵmâ is knowing how the world works. Mûsār is being corrected when you get it wrong — and Proverbs treats the second as a gift rather than a punishment: "whom the LORD loveth he correcteth; even as a father the son in whom he delighteth" (3:12).

And that verse travels. Proverbs 3:11–12 is quoted directly in Hebrews 12:5–6, where the Greek behind mûsār is paideia — the word for the whole formation of a child, education and correction together. The writer of Hebrews reads Proverbs and concludes that being corrected is evidence of sonship, not of disfavour.

Cross-Language Connections

Ecclesiastes never uses the word Ecclesiastes. Its first line names its author with a Hebrew word that has no clean English equivalent, and every translation has had to choose.

"The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem." (Ecclesiastes 1:1)

"Preacher" is qōheleṯ (קֹהֶלֶת), and it belongs to the same word family as qāhāl — an assembly, a congregation gathered together. So the name means something like the one who gathers, or the one who addresses the gathering. It is closer to convener than to preacher, and it may be a title rather than a name.

The English name comes from the Greek. The Septuagint translated qōheleṯ as Ἐκκλησιαστής — from ekklēsia (ἐκκλησία), the assembly — and Jerome carried it into Latin unchanged. So Ecclesiastes is a Greek translation of a Hebrew job description.

And there is a connection here worth getting exactly right, because it is easy to state slightly wrong. Ekklēsia is the Greek that renders qāhāl — from the same word family as qōheleṯ — and it is the word the New Testament uses when the Savior says "upon this rock I will build my church" (Matthew 16:18). So the assembly word of Ecclesiastes is the assembly word of the New Testament, and ecclesiastical belongs to that same family.

The English word church, though, arrives by a different road. It comes down through Old English cirice from a second Greek word: kyriakon (κυριακόν), meaning belonging to the Lord, from kyrios (κύριος), Lord.

So the two words meet in your English Bible rather than in the family tree. Ekklēsia is what the text says; church is what the translators reached for; and the word they reached for means the Lord's own. Both halves are true and neither is diminished by the other — the gathering, and whose gathering it is.

Which is worth a moment. The book most likely to unsettle a believer is named for the person who stands up in front of the congregation. Not an outsider. The one at the front.

Cross-Language Connections

"Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life" (Proverbs 4:23). A modern reader might hear guard your emotions. The Hebrew includes more than that.

lēḇ (לֵב) is the seat of thought, will and feeling. When Solomon asks for an "understanding heart" he is asking for judgement. When Pharaoh's lēḇ is hardened, it is his resolve. The word can also describe emotions and desires. Like English expressions such as a change of heart or learning by heart, its uses reach beyond romance.

Proverbs 4:23 asks us to attend to the inner life from which our actions grow: thoughts, desires, feelings and decisions. Key Passages, passage 3 explores the verse's image of life flowing from that source.

And it explains why this book keeps returning to the heart. "Trust in the LORD with all thine heart" (3:5) asks for more than a feeling. It includes our decisions, in a book that has just told you not to lean your weight on your own judgement.

Cross-Language Connections

Most of what follows comes from rabbinic sources — the collected discussions of Jewish teachers, written down between roughly the second and twelfth centuries. Three appear below:

• The Mishnah — the earliest layer, compiled about AD 200. A citation like "Yadayim 3:5" means the tractate (Yadayim, on ritual purity of the hands), the chapter, and the paragraph.
• The Talmud — the long record of debate built on the Mishnah.
• Midrash Rabbah — commentary that works by association: a rabbi reads one verse, hears another answering it, and sets the two side by side. Kohelet Rabbah is the volume on Ecclesiastes.

These are Jewish interpretations, not statements of Latter-day Saint doctrine or practices to adopt. They show how earlier readers wrestled with questions this week's books still raise. The source links lead to Sefaria, a free digital library of Jewish texts. Each section also offers a comparison with our own scriptures, without treating the two traditions as identical.

If you read Ecclesiastes this week and thought is this really scripture? — you are asking a question recorded in an ancient Jewish debate.

The Mishnah records the debate in a tractate about ritual purity, and the technical phrase is strange until you know it. A sacred scroll is said to "defile the hands" — handling it makes a person ritually impure, and that impurity is the marker of holiness, not of contamination. So "defiles the hands" is the rabbinic way of saying "this book is scripture."

"All the Holy Scriptures defile the hands. The Song of Songs and Kohelet defile the hands.

Rabbi Judah says: the Song of Songs defiles the hands, but there is a dispute about Kohelet. Rabbi Yose says: Kohelet does not defile the hands, but there is a dispute about the Song of

Songs." (Yadayim 3:5)

Two named teachers, and an anonymous opening ruling, preserved in the text rather than tidied out of it. Rabbi Yose thought this book did not belong. The tradition wrote his opinion down and kept it, and kept the book too.

Latter-day Saint Connection

The Joseph Smith Translation manuscript records, “The Songs of Solomon are not Inspired writings,” without explaining the judgment. The book nevertheless remains in our Bible. Jewish interpreters have long read its lovers as an image of God and Israel. Read within that tradition, its poetry invites reflection on covenant love, longing, intimacy, and trust. We can acknowledge the manuscript’s statement while also attending carefully to what readers have found sacred in the Song. (Bible Dictionary)

Ecclesiastes 2 is a man with unlimited resources testing whether pleasure, building, learning or wealth will satisfy him. The rabbis put a sentence to that experiment which explains why the answer was always going to be no.

Reading Ecclesiastes 3:10 — rendered in the midrash as "I have seen the matters that God has given to the sons of men, in which to engage" — Rabbi Yudan said in the name of Rabbi Aivu:

"A person does not leave the world having achieved even half of his desire; rather, if he has one

hundred, he wishes to turn them into two hundred. If he has two hundred, he wishes to turn them

into four hundred."

(Kohelet Rabbah 3)

The point is simple: getting more can make us want more, rather than leave us satisfied. Someone who reaches a financial goal may immediately set a larger one. The rabbi's observation helps us think about the dissatisfaction described in Ecclesiastes 2.

Latter-day Saint Connection

Jacob 2:18–19 gives our priorities a different starting point: "before ye seek for riches, seek ye for the kingdom of God." Verse 19 then names a purpose for wealth: helping people in need. Rather than promising that desire will disappear, Jacob directs it toward service.

What would change if your next financial goal included someone else's needs?

"He hath made every thing beautiful in his time" (Ecclesiastes 3:11) is usually read as comfort about events: things happen when they are meant to. One midrash applies the verse to the order in which people enter history.

Rabbi Bon asked why Adam came before Abraham, when Abraham was the more faithful man:

"Abraham was worthy to have been created before Adam, the first man, but the Holy One blessed be

He said: If I create Abraham first, if he sins, there will be no one to come to make amends after

him. Rather, I will create Adam, and if he sins, Abraham will come…"

(Kohelet Rabbah 3)

In Rabbi Bon's reading, Abraham comes later so that someone can respond to what went wrong before him. The emphasis is on the possibility of repair, not on saying that every event is pleasant or that the verse has only this meaning.

Rabbi Tanḥuma applied the same verse to creation itself: "The world was created at its appointed time; it was not fit to have been created earlier."

Latter-day Saint Connection

Latter-day Saints may hear a point of comparison with 2 Nephi 2:25, "Adam fell that men might be", and a Redeemer prepared "from the foundation of the world" (Mosiah 4:6–7). The rabbis are not teaching the Fall as we understand it, and Rabbi Bon is not describing Christ. But he is reading Ecclesiastes 3:11 and arriving at the order was arranged so that repair would be possible — an interpretation we can consider without equating Abraham with the Redeemer.

Proverbs urges us to choose wisely; Ecclesiastes reminds us how much we cannot see. Rabbi Akiva offers a saying about divine knowledge and human choice that is useful to read beside them:

"Everything is foreseen yet freedom of choice is granted."

(Pirkei Avot 3:15)

The saying affirms both divine foreknowledge and genuine human choice. This comparison is ours; the saying itself does not claim to explain the relationship between Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

Latter-day Saint Connection

2 Nephi 2:27 affirms our freedom to choose. Alma 40:8 speaks of God's different relation to time: "all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men." They address related questions without using exactly the same terms as Akiva. How can trust in God's knowledge strengthen, rather than replace, your responsibility to choose?

Ecclesiastes 3:11 raises questions about our longing to understand God's work, discussed in Key Passages, passage 6. A separate teaching from Rabbi Akiva offers a companion thought about what God has made known to us:

"Beloved is man for he was created in the image of God. Especially beloved is he for it was made known to him that he had been created in the image of God."

(Pirkei Avot 3:14)

Akiva distinguishes two blessings: being made in God's image, and knowing that we are. He describes that knowledge as a further expression of God's love. This is not a commentary on Ecclesiastes 3:11, but it offers a helpful contrast: we do not know all of God's work, yet we have been told something precious about our relationship with Him.

Latter-day Saint Connection

Moses 1:4 offers a distinct but related example: God tells Moses, "thou art my son," before showing him the workmanship of His hands.

The smallness comes after, at Moses 1:10: "man is nothing, which thing I never had supposed." Moses learns his limitations without losing the assurance of that relationship.

(The three-verse reading that follows from this is in Teaching Applications, where it can be used.)

The custom of a husband reciting Proverbs 31 at the Friday evening table is real and widely practised in Jewish homes — worth knowing, and not treated here beyond the mention.

Seven settings, and you are not meant to use all of them. Each takes one idea from the week and does something with it. Several activities invite readers to practise a proverb during the week and notice what happens. The linked discussions supply the background when you need it.

The soft answer, as an experiment. Read Proverbs 15:1 — "A soft answer turneth away wrath." Ask everyone to try a calm reply during an ordinary disagreement and come back with what they noticed. A gentle answer can help; it does not give us control over another person's anger or require anyone to remain in an unsafe situation.

The two hundred. For older children: a rabbi reading Ecclesiastes wrote "if he has one hundred, he wishes to turn them into two hundred. If he has two hundred, he wishes…" — we have cut the quotation there on purpose. Ask what they think comes next, then read them what the rabbi actually wrote: four hundred. Then read Ecclesiastes 2:10–11 and let them see a man who actually ran the experiment.

A quieter option for a hard week. Ecclesiastes 3:1–8, read slowly, one person per pair. "A time to weep, and a time to laugh." For a family in the middle of something, that is the whole lesson — the list is in scripture because both halves happen to everyone.

Open with the half nobody quotes. Put Proverbs 3:5–6 on the board with the second clause covered. Everyone can finish the first. Then uncover "lean not unto thine own understanding" and ask what it costs. The Hebrew sharpens it: you are told not to rest your weight on your best judgement — not on your ignorance. (Key Passages, passage 2, works both verbs through.)

Then discuss the promise of direction. Ask the class how God has helped them take a next step when the whole route was not clear. Key Passages, passage 2 explains the path imagery without limiting the ways God can guide us.

The question that carries the hour: both books are in the canon and they do not say the same thing. What can we learn by reading them together?

Wisdom is a skill, not a school subject. The Hebrew word for wisdom, ḥāḵmâ (חָכְמָה), is the same word used for the craftsmen who built the tabernacle — people who knew how wood and cloth and stone actually behave. Ask what they are already good at. Then: what if being wise is like that — knowing how people actually work?

Build the alphabet poem. The poem at the end of Proverbs 31 — verses 10 to 31 — is twenty-two verses, and each one starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, all the way from the first letter to the last. Have them write a short A-to-Z about someone they love — one line per letter, as far as they get. Then tell them how an alphabet can help a writer build a broad portrait and help a reader remember it.

For a shorter activity, use the soft-answer exercise in Family, above.

A book that admits it did not work. Show them Ecclesiastes 2: a man with unlimited money tries pleasure, building projects, learning and wealth, and writes down that none of it filled him. Then tell them the rabbis argued about whether this book belonged in the Bible at all — one of them said it did not, and his opinion was written down and kept next to the book.

Say plainly why that matters: scripture kept the objection. Teenagers who have been told that faithful people are never in doubt should meet a book the faithful argued over and preserved anyway.

And the word underneath it. "Vanity of vanities" is heḇel (הֶבֶל) — vapour, breath, mist you can see and cannot hold. Modern Bibles render it meaningless, futile, fleeting; the image underneath all of them is breath. Ask what in their own lives is real and still cannot be held.

Proverbs 1:7 as the book's thesis, and the word underneath it. "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge." Beginning is rēʾšît (רֵאשִׁית) — the word that opens Genesis, in the beginning — and the same word is used for firstfruits, the first and best of the harvest. Whether 1:7 is reaching for the second sense is a question worth putting to a class, not a settled reading: does it say where knowledge starts, or the best of what knowledge has? The vocabulary is discussed in Key Passages, passage 1.

Then read them one sentence of Elder Bednar's, from "Therefore They Hushed Their Fears" (April 2015), which answers the objection a class actually has: "I do not believe we will be afraid of Him at all." Let that sit before anyone explains it. (The fuller quotation and the citation are in Key Passages, passage 1.)

And the sentence that holds the two books together, from the Mishnah — the earliest written collection of rabbinic teaching, gathered around AD 200, and not a text of our own faith — in its collection of sayings. Rabbi Akiva: "Everything is foreseen yet freedom of choice is granted." He states both divine knowledge and human choice. Put it beside 2 Nephi 2:27 and Alma 40:8 and ask what each passage says about our responsibility and God's knowledge.

"Lean not" offers a starting point for teaching by the Spirit. A missionary with a good plan and a real prompting has exactly the choice Proverbs 3:5 describes — and the verse does not say the plan is bad. It says do not rest your weight on it.

Proverbs 15:1 is a companionship skill. Doors, companions, discouraged members. A soft answer causes wrath to turn back — the verb is šûḇ (שׁוּב), meaning to return. Practise a reply that does not escalate a disagreement. The proverb commends gentle speech; it does not make you responsible for controlling someone else's anger.

And Ecclesiastes for the investigator who has been let down. People who have done everything right and had it go wrong are not helped by Proverbs alone. Ecclesiastes is in the canon for them, and knowing that is in the Bible is worth more than an explanation.

Take one real decision and read Proverbs 3:5–6 against it — honestly. Not the comfortable half. Ask what you are currently leaning your weight on, and whether the answer is my own understanding. Most of us find it is, and finding it is the point.

Read Ecclesiastes 3:1–11 in one sitting, and do not stop at verse 8. Notice how verse 11 holds our longing to understand beside the limits of our knowledge. The translation question is explained in Key Passages, passage 6.

Then compare three verses: Ecclesiastes 3:11 → Moses 1:10 → Moses 1:39. What does each say about human limits or God's purposes? What does Moses 1 add to your reading?

And a question worth carrying, which needs nothing but a Bible open on the table. Ecclesiastes 12:13 says "this is the whole duty of man" — have someone look at that verse and find the word in italics. The translators set duty in italics to say honestly that they supplied it; the Hebrew reads "the whole of man." Ask how obedience can shape a whole life rather than become only a checklist. The supplied word is a translation choice, not proof that the translation is wrong. (The Hebrew is worked through in Key Passages, passage 7.)

Seven questions. Several have no settled answer, and those are marked. They are meant for a person with a Bible open, not for a quiz.

1. Why would a book about getting wisdom tell you not to lean on it?

Proverbs spends thirty-one chapters urging you to acquire wisdom. Then in chapter 3 it says "lean not unto thine own understanding" (Proverbs 3:5) — and the Hebrew word, bînâ (בִּינָה), is not about ignorance. It is discernment, the ability to tell one thing from another. The best judgement you have.

Both things are true in the same book. Wisdom is worth everything, and it will not bear your weight.

Sit with this rather than solving it. What is the difference between using your judgement

and resting your weight on it? You have probably done both this month.

2. How do you trust God's direction when you cannot see the whole path?

"He shall direct thy paths" is yāšar (יָשַׁר) — to make straight, to make level, or to direct. The image invites trust; it does not limit the ways God can guide us. (Worked through in Key Passages, passage 2.)

Think of a decision you are carrying right now. What direction have you already received, and what step could you take with it?

3. What are you currently testing?

Ecclesiastes 2 describes the pursuit of pleasure, great projects, learning and wealth without lasting satisfaction. Jewish Perspective, section 2 adds a rabbi's observation that getting more can leave us wanting more.

Where are you hoping the next achievement will finally make you content? How might the

invitation to enjoy God's daily gifts in Ecclesiastes 2:24–25 change that pursuit?

4. The rabbis argued about whether Ecclesiastes belonged in the Bible. Should that comfort you or trouble you?

The Mishnah preserves a disagreement about the book's sacred status. Read the discussion and the explanation of its ritual language in Jewish Perspective, section 1.

No settled answer. Some readers find it reassuring that scripture can hold what argues with

it. Others find it unsettling. Both reactions are honest, and the discomfort you feel reading Ecclesiastes is one the book has always produced.

5. How do you live with a longing to understand more than you can see?

Read Ecclesiastes 3:11 alongside Moses 1:4, 10 and 39. Key Passages, passage 6 discusses why many translations use eternity where the King James reads world.

What can Moses know about his relationship with God even while discovering his own limits?

What helps you remain faithful when an important question is still unanswered?

6. "The whole duty of man" — or "the whole of man"?

Ecclesiastes 12:13 is the book's conclusion — though not quite its last word, since verse 14 follows: "Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man."

Open a King James Bible and look at that verse. Duty is in italics — the translators' honest signal that they supplied it. The Hebrew is "this is the whole OF man."

How can reverence and obedience shape a whole life, rather than become only a checklist?

Read verse 14 too. What does accountability before God add to your understanding of the conclusion?

7. What does it mean that Proverbs 31 is an alphabet poem?

Twenty-two verses, each beginning with the next Hebrew letter, aleph through tav. The same form as Psalm 119. It is built to be memorised — but the form is also making a claim: an A-to-Z means everything, from start to finish.

And the portrait it draws is not the one the King James wording suggests — the word behind "virtuous" is a military one, and the only other woman scripture calls the same thing is Ruth. Both are worked through in Key Passages, passage 5.

The poem follows a mother's instruction to her son the king (Proverbs 31:1–9) — though the

poem itself, verses 10–31, is not attributed to her.

Does standing where it stands change who you think it is describing?