• are brief; • are grounded in experience; • often arise from careful observation of life and the world; • are expressed in a memorable form; • claim to present a valuable insight. On this basis a Hebrew proverb might be defined as ‘a realistic reflection on life crystallized in a brief, memorable sentence’. What this implies is that often a particular proverb will have arisen out of a particular experience or observation, and its meaning will relate to that original context. However, once it passes