Canter Bridge

No biblical proverb has challenged the delicacy of its translators more than 14.4. The squirming is like unto a spectator sport.

If there are no oxen the crib is clean, But a rich harvest comes through the strength of the ox. (Proverbs 14:4 JPS)

Clearly, the conditions of productivity are in play.

The primary challenge comes with the meaning of the words here translated ‘crib’ (אבוס) and ‘clean’ (בר).

Is אבוס the ox’s feeding trough, where he eats? Or is it his stable, where he grunts, walks, drools, and defecates?

And in the ox’s absence, does Hebrew בר portray the thing as clean? Or merely as empty of the grain a good farmer lies in store for his oxen?

In my view, the verbal snapshot likely portrays a clean, unused feeding trough.

Yet the proverb means to broaden out both itself and our understanding in the way of such agricultural imagery in order to speak of two paths. As a whole declaration, the saying juxtaposes the dainty neatness of sterility—with the hungry families that ensue—to the stinking mess of a strong ox doing the ox-like work required if a family was to enjoy a full larder against winter’s long pause.

A productive life is messy. An effete cleanliness, in this sense, is hardly next to godliness. It is sometimes the antechamber to starvation.

If you want life shiny and wiped down, you can have that, the proverb seems to teach. But if you want full tummies, minds and bodies growing up strong and lithe, challenges that matter and truth hard grasped, you’ll need to put up with some stink and disorder. Life long, hard, and worthy creates some messes along the way.

No shit, no food.

In my corner of the American state called Pennsylvania, late Spring’s emerging warmth always brought with it the aroma of the cow manure spread by the farmers on the town’s margins across fields that would soon send lush green crops skyward. City folks crinkled up their noses and wondered what the awful smell was.

We small-town locals breathed deeply in a way that must have seemed barbaric to the uninitiated, sometimes murmuring to ourselves the word ‘cow …’ to distinguish the source from its alternative, ‘pig’.

Do you really want life clean, neat, and safe?, biblical wisdom asks in one of its odder moments? ‘Better think twice.

Now get that ox moving.