Friendship

Reading these passages

One verse on this page is a puzzle the translators have never solved, and it is worth starting there, because how you read it changes what the page is saying.

The King James has it: A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. Read that way it is advice — friendship is reciprocal, and you get what you put in.

Open a modern translation and the first half often says something close to the opposite: that a man of many companions comes to ruin. The reason is that the Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous. The consonants behind the key word can be pointed as a form meaning to associate or befriend, or as a form meaning to be broken. One reading produces a maxim about being a good friend. The other produces a warning about collecting too many.

Nobody has settled it, and the two halves of the verse work with either. What the second half says is not in doubt: there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother — and in a culture organised around kinship, that is a startling thing to write down. Brothers were the given obligation. The proverb says something chosen can bind tighter.

Proverbs is not sentimental about it

The book that supplies most of this page treats friendship as a hazard as readily as a good, and it does so without changing tone. He that walketh with wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed.

The verb in the second half is strong — the Hebrew carries the sense of being broken or shattered, not merely of picking up bad habits. And notice the mechanism is the same in both halves. Company transmits. Proverbs does not say the wise man chooses well and the fool chooses badly; it says proximity does the work either way, which makes friendship a thing that happens to you as much as a thing you do.

The same book is equally unsentimental about what a friend is for: Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. The two nouns are deliberately mismatched. Wounds against kisses — the friend is the one who hurts you and the enemy the one who is pleasant. Whatever the proverb means by friendship, it does not mean agreeableness, and it assumes the relationship is robust enough to survive being told the truth.

Which is the point the sharpening image makes physically: Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. Sharpening is abrasive. It works by removing material, it makes noise, and both pieces of iron are altered by it. The proverb is often quoted as praise for stimulating conversation; the picture underneath is friction.

Two are better than one

Ecclesiastes argues the case the way Ecclesiastes argues everything — practically, and with the losses admitted. Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.

What follows is a list of situations rather than a description of feeling, and every one of them is a contingency: For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Then warmth. Then defence. Falling, cold, attack. The argument for companionship is built entirely out of things going wrong.

That is characteristic of the book. Ecclesiastes has spent three chapters establishing that most human effort is vapour, and it does not reverse itself here. It simply observes that the vapour is more survivable with someone in it, and closes with the line that has outlived its context: and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Three, not two — after an entire passage about pairs. The number has attracted a great deal of interpretation, most commonly that the third strand is God. Ecclesiastes says nothing of the kind, and the plainer reading is that a rope-maker knows two strands twist apart and three hold. Either way the image concedes the point it is making: the cord is not unbreakable. It is not quickly broken.

A friend at all times

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

The two halves are usually read as one thought, with the brother as another word for the friend. They may not be. The Hebrew sets up a comparison, and it can equally be read as a contrast: the friend loves in all seasons; the brother is the one who turns up when things go wrong. Different roles, both valuable, and the proverb declining to rank them.

At all times is the load-bearing phrase either way. It is a claim about consistency rather than intensity, and the standard it sets is duration — which is the one thing that cannot be demonstrated quickly, and the reason friendship in Proverbs is always discussed in the long tense.

Sharpening the face

The iron proverb has an oddity in it that most English readers pass over, because the King James translated it literally and the literal version does not quite make sense: Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

The countenance. The Hebrew says face, and what it says about the face is that it gets sharpened — the same verb used of a blade. Nobody is certain what the idiom meant. The likeliest sense is that the face brightens or grows keen, the way an expression changes when someone is being taken seriously; the sharpening happens to the look on a person rather than to the person.

Which fits the first half better than the usual reading does. Two blades do not improve each other by agreeing. They improve each other by contact hard enough to remove material, and the visible result is an edge. Applied to friendship, the proverb is not describing encouragement. It is describing what it looks like on someone's face to be met by a person who will not simply concur.

From a bond to a marker

The Old Testament passages on this page treat friendship as a private relation between two people. The New Testament ones do something different, and it is easy to miss because the vocabulary overlaps.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.

The audience for that sentence is not the friends. It is everyone else. Affection between members is being made into evidence, visible from outside and offered as the test — not doctrine, not conduct in general, but how these particular people treat each other. Friendship has been promoted from a private good to a public argument, which is a considerable weight to put on it.

Paul assumes the same and gets specific about the mechanics: Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another. The first phrase translates philostorgoi, built on the word for family affection — the particular fondness relatives have, which is not usually chosen and not usually earned. Paul asks for it between people who are not relatives.

And the second phrase describes a competition run backwards: each trying to get the other recognised first. It is the only contest anywhere on this page that anyone is encouraged to enter, and the way to win it is to lose.

The one verse that is not about friendship

The most quoted line on this page is not, in its setting, about friends at all: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Jesus says it on the last night, hours before his arrest, in a passage where he is explaining what he is about to do. It is not a general observation about human loyalty; it is a man describing his own death in advance and using the word friends for the people he is about to die for — which, a few verses later, he applies to them directly, telling them he no longer calls them servants.

That reframes the rest of the page. Every proverb here measures friendship by what it survives: bad company, hard truths, falling, cold, attack. This sets the ceiling somewhere else entirely, and it does it by example rather than instruction.

It also settles a question the proverbs leave open. Proverbs keeps asking what a friend is worth and answering in terms of what a friend is good for — sharpening, lifting, warming, defending. All of it useful, all of it reciprocal, and all of it measurable. This sentence prices friendship at the one figure that cannot be recovered, and does not mention what is received in return.