Thus proverbs are not mere decoration meant to be decoded once and for all, but creative puzzles meant to engage speaker and hearer in an open and imaginative relationship. Roland Murphy similarly argues that proverbs often sound straightforward when they are not. “The reader is left to qualify it by other contexts, by exceptions, by experiences that run contrary to it … [the proverb] provides insight, not only by what is said, but by the process: the reader can be startled, and thus invited to go