Verse of the day · September 20

What does the multitude of counsellors mean in Proverbs 15:22?

Some men will not talk a matter over even with themselves.

Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.
Proverbs 15:22

A man in a hurry has determined a matter and resolved upon it, and he goes about it at once. He has come to it without mature deliberation: he has not talked it out with himself, he has not taken anybody else's advice, and he has formed no scheme at all for bringing his design about. And it generally comes to nothing. What defeats him in the end is circumstance, and it is the kind of circumstance that a little consultation might have foreseen and obviated. He comes short of his point and does not gain his end, and the reason the proverb gives for all of it is that he would not ask counsel about the way.

Some men will not take the time and pains to deliberate a thing out even with themselves. Others are so confident of their own judgment that they scorn to consult with anybody, and neither sort, Matthew Henry writes, is likely to bring anything considerable to pass. The rule he draws out of that covers public affairs and domestic ones together, and it is to do nothing rashly and of one's own head. Many eyes see more than one.

The first clause has been read the other way about, and John Gill gives that reading room on the page. Without counsel can be rendered without a secret, which is to say without keeping one: if a man makes no secret of what he means to do, he is easily counterworked, and it is much if his intentions are not frustrated. The Targum, quoted by Gill on the same clause, has it as a flat maxim: vain are the thoughts where there is no secret. Making no secret of a design and taking advice upon it are not the same act, and Gill's note carries both.

The second clause puts other men around him. The man has thought the matter out and purposed it already, Gill says, and what the advice of others does — and these many, he adds — is confirm him that he is right in what he has purposed to do. Everything after that follows from being confirmed. He goes about the business with the greater spirit and cheerfulness, and he is most likely to succeed, and generally does. The verse leaves the word they to stand on its own, and Gill says plainly what it stands for: his purposes are established, as they are in a proverb five chapters further on. Gill closes his own note by sending the reader back to Proverbs 11:14, and the Geneva Notes on this verse consist of nothing but that same instruction — no comment on it at all.

The heading Henry puts over the clause about counsellors is about asking the advice of our friends. And where he states the benefit, he attaches a condition to it, and provided is the first word in it. The counsellors are to be discreet and honest, and they are not to give counsel with a spirit of contradiction; on those terms, purposes are established. Each of those is a property of the man giving the counsel, and adding another man to the room supplies none of them. For JFB the word counsel is deliberation, and inside it they hear a wise deference to the opinions of the wise and good, contrasted with rashness.

Solomon's son, Henry writes, made no good use of this proverb. The counsel of the old men had been given to him already, and he did not acquiesce in it. What he wanted after that was a multitude of counsellors, which is the very thing the verse holds out to a man, and he made himself one by advising with the young men. He had counsel the whole way through. What he regarded in the men he gathered was their number more than their weight.

He had his father's proverb to hand, and the word he took out of it was multitude. The condition attached to that word asked nothing at all about how many they were, only that they be discreet and honest men with no spirit of contradiction in them. What often proves best is the thing that was least our own doing. The deference the word counsel carries is the hearer's own to give, and he had withheld it from the old men before he ever counted the young ones.

Drawn from Matthew Henry, John Gill, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary and the Geneva Bible notes. How these teachings are made

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