contradicting advice in the same book of the Bible to be a symptom of reckless decision making and a culture with a failed values system. They want Proverbs to teach people to make loans secured with collateral, or teach them not to, but not both. They have no tolerance for ambiguity or inconsistency. We have tried to meet the challenges of semiotics and structural linguistics—two of the philosophies of language that both defined and developed the linguistic turn—and to remain sensitive to the cultural