Pigs and Beautiful Women

“As a ring of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a beautiful woman who lacks discretion” (Proverbs 11:22).

During his courtship with his future wife, a friend of mine wrote a note and cited a Proverb at the end. He meant Proverbs 22:11. He put Proverbs 11:22. They laugh about it when they tell the story, after some decades of marriage.

The Proverb is not merely about incongruence. The direction of the comparison is critical. Solomon doesn’t say that a beautiful woman without discretion is like a painting with a slight blemish, or a statue with a crack.

The flaw is more fundamental. It affects the woman’s nature, as it were. Her piggish lack of discretion makes her a pig, and turns her beauty into an unsuitable, grotesquely comic ornament.

Vices, at least some of them, become so basic as to determine what sort of animal we are.