Does Being Righteous Guarantee Good Memory? (Proverbs 10:7)

Proverbs 10:7 NKJV The memory of the righteous is blessed...

When I was in my former church’s youth ministry, the youth leaders would use Bible verses to encourage those whose examinations were coming up. One of those verses was Proverbs 10:7. They would say: “The Bible says that the memory of the righteous is blessed, so you will be able to remember all the things you studied!”

I still remember being puzzled about why the Bible would talk about a righteous person’s ability to remember things in this passage. I also thought that it was a very unfair assessment of reality. What about Christians like me who found it really difficult to remember content? Does that then mean that we were not righteous persons?

However, when I opened my Bible to Proverbs chapter 10, I realized that my youth leader had only quoted the first half of the verse; he had left out the other half!

Here is Proverbs 10:7 in full:

Proverbs 10:7 NKJV The memory of the righteous is blessed, but the name of the wicked shall rot.

Like many other verses in the Book of Proverbs, 10:7 is written in the form of an antithetic parallelism, where the second part of the verse would state the opposite of the first part. According to the parallelism, “the memory of the righteous” is parallel with “the name of the wicked.” Here, the “name” of a person refers to his reputation. Thus, it is clear that the word “memory” here refers to the remembrance of a righteous person rather than his ability to remember things.

This can be further confirmed by looking at the meaning of the word in the original Hebrew text. The Hebrew word for “memory” here is zēḵer, which means “remembrance”, and has nothing at all to do with the ability to remember things.