emulation by poorer women who lived in economically deprived families; on the margins of households as servants, concubines, and slaves; and as the extremely poor who existed on the charity of those like this wealthy but hard-working wife. The poem provides an appropriate inclusion for the entire book of Proverbs, not only in dealing with the incarnation of wisdom in a female form—a noble housewife—but also in the reference toward the end of the poem that describes her “fear of Yahweh” (31:30;