Polyglot Bible: Proverbs: Proverbs 30

This is a scholarly parallel-text presentation of Proverbs 30 (the "Words of Agur") displayed simultaneously across four ancient versions: the King James Version (English), the Septuagint (Greek), the Hebrew Masoretic Text, and the Latin Vulgate. The chapter consists of a wisdom poem attributed to Agur son of Jakeh, who opens with an unusual confession of ignorance — declaring himself more brutish than any man, lacking wisdom and knowledge of the holy — before posing a series of rhetorical questions about who has ascended to heaven, gathered the wind, or bound the waters, implicitly pointing to a creator God whose word is pure. The bulk of the text is structured around numerical sayings ("three things… yea, four"), cataloguing insatiable things (Sheol, a barren womb, fire), mysterious things (the way of an eagle in the air, a serpent on rock, a ship at sea, a man with a maiden), socially intolerable things (a servant who becomes king, a fool filled with food), and admirably ordered small creatures (ants, conies, locusts, spiders). A distinctive feature of the presentation is that it makes the Septuagint's notable divergences from the Hebrew immediately visible — for instance, the LXX renders "two daughters" of the leech as "three daughters" and replaces "greyhound" with "rooster" in the majestic-walker list — making this a useful resource for anyone studying textual transmission and translation variation in the Hebrew Bible.

Polyglot Bible: Proverbs: Proverbs 30

Related pages View as graph →