Verse of the day · September 6
What does with all thy getting mean in Proverbs 4:7?
Solomon had tutors. His father did the teaching anyway.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding.
Proverbs 4:7
David was a man of public business and had tutors for his son, and he took all the pains of teaching the boy himself. Solomon was a prince and heir-apparent to the crown, and his parents did not let him live at large; being a prince was why they did not. Perhaps David was the stricter for having seen what undue indulgence did in Absalom, and in Adonijah, whom he had not crossed in any thing. The boy was catechised, kept to his book and held to a strict discipline, and years later he wrote down what he had been taught and handed it on.
When Solomon was grown he took a pleasure in repeating the good lessons of his childhood, and did not look on them as childish things a king should put away. Though he was a wise man himself and divinely inspired, Matthew Henry writes on the passage, when he came to teach wisdom he did not think it below him to quote his father and make use of his words. If we must keep to the good old way, Henry asks, why should we scorn the good old words?
The proverb's first word is one John Gill takes for a person. Wisdom is the principal thing, or the principal one: the principal of persons and of things, superior to angels and to the greatest of men, King of kings and Lord of lords.
What the second half asks for is therefore not the same thing. Get wisdom is not a command to get an interest in Christ, in Gill's reading, but to come to the knowledge of it, using all means to obtain a greater knowledge of him. He sets Paul's word beside it: when the apostle counts all things loss that he may win Christ, what he is after is not an interest in him, which he had already, but a greater degree of the knowledge of him.
JFB gloss the getting of the last clause as possession, and add one line about the wanting: a desire for wisdom is wise. The Geneva Notes read the verse as an order of business: we must first begin with God's word if we would have other things prosper with us, contrary to the judgment of the world, which makes it their last study, or else does not care for it at all.
The command comes with a list of things to do about it. Pray for it, Henry has it, take pains for it, get dominion over thy corruptions, which are thy follies, and wait at wisdom's gate. And get it above all thy getting: be more in care and take more pains to get this than to get the wealth of this world, and whatever thou forgettest, get this. It is the main matter and the continual care of every man in this life, and the other things we are solicitous to get and keep are nothing to it.
True wisdom is God's gift, and men are commanded to get it because God gives it to those that labour for it; and having laboured, Henry adds, they must not say that their might and the power of their hand have gotten them this wealth. Gill's alternative for get is buy. Buy wisdom, he renders it, without money and without price, the way Christ advises a church to buy gold of him, and white raiment, his grace and righteousness.
With all thy getting is rendered along with all thy getting, or above all, or above all that thou possessest. Let not Christ be wanting, Gill writes: he is the one thing needful, the good and better part and portion, and if he is missing all other substance signifies little. Or part with all for this pearl of great price, and look upon all but dross in comparison of Christ and the knowledge of him. The other gettings are for the body and for a time; this is for the soul and for eternity, and a soul that has it has enough.
If we cannot reach to be great masters of wisdom, Henry writes, let us be true lovers of it, loving it as worldly men love their wealth and set their hearts upon it. And keep her, whatever it cost thee, for she is thy life. Solomon was to be a king, and his wisdom and virtue would be more his honour than his crown or purple.
Solomon had one son that we read of, and he set up for a schoolmaster anyway and taught other people's children. The proverbs seem to have been dedicated to that son, and there is reason to think thousands of strangers have got more good by them than he did; Rehoboam was far from being one of the wisest or one of the best. Nobody had kept the book from him. The price it named was never money, so a poor man is not shut out of it, and a king's son was not carried into it.
Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes.
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