Proverbs opens with nine chapters of extended poetic instruction addressed from a father to a son, culminating in wisdom itself personified as a woman, calling out in the streets and inviting the simple to her table, set against a rival figure, folly, who offers a similarly tempting but ultimately fatal invitation. After this sustained introduction the book shifts abruptly into its most famous form, hundreds of short, self-contained two-line proverbs on wealth, laziness, speech, anger, friendship and family life, arranged with little obvious topical order, covering everything from "a soft answer turns away wrath" to blunt warnings against the seductive stranger and the sluggard who will not leave his bed.
The book closes with two more distinct voices, the otherwise unknown Agur's riddling, numerically patterned sayings, and King Lemuel's teaching, itself explicitly attributed to his mother, ending in the famous acrostic poem describing the "woman of valor," or virtuous wife, whose capable household management, trade and generosity is offered as the practical embodiment of wisdom the whole book has been building toward. Unlike the more universal ethical demands of the Torah's law, Proverbs largely teaches through observation of consequence, that a given way of living tends, though not always, to lead to a given result.