Catholic Commentary
Agur's Prayer for Honesty and Sufficiency
7“Two things I have asked of you. Don’t deny me before I die.8Remove far from me falsehood and lies. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me,9lest I be full, deny you, and say, ‘Who is Yahweh?’ or lest I be poor, and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.
Proverbs 30:7–9 presents Agur's prayer requesting two essential things: freedom from falsehood and a life of sufficiency rather than extremes of wealth or poverty. He fears that excessive riches would cause him to deny God, while destitution might compel him to steal and dishonor God's name.
Agur prays not for blessing but for the dangerous gift of enough — because both feast and famine can make us forget God's name.
Proverbs 30:7 — "Two things I have asked of you" The opening declaration is structurally striking. Agur does not present God with a catalogue of requests. He distils a lifetime of spiritual discernment into two petitions, placed in deliberate parallel in the Hebrew. The verb šāʾal ("to ask") carries in biblical Hebrew the weight of a formal, earnest entreaty — the same verb used when Solomon asks God for wisdom (1 Kgs 3:11). Agur's economy of petition is itself a form of wisdom: knowing what one truly needs is already a moral achievement. The phrase "before I die" (v. 7b, often included in fuller translations) adds urgency and frames the entire prayer as a final reckoning — a distillation of what matters most when measured against mortality.
Verse 8a — "Remove far from me falsehood and lies" The Hebrew uses two near-synonymous terms — šāwʾ (vanity, emptiness, falsehood) and dĕbar-kāzāb (word of deceit/lie) — forming a hendiadys that encompasses the full spectrum of untruth: not just outright lying but the subtler terrain of self-deception, empty speech, and the inflation of reality. The verb "remove far" (harḥēq) implies that falsehood is conceived as a proximity danger — something that clings, encroaches, colonizes. Agur asks not merely to avoid telling lies but to be placed at a maximum distance from the entire atmosphere of unreality. This is significant: he treats dishonesty as an environmental threat to the soul, not just a behavioral failing.
Verse 8b–9 — The Prayer for Sufficiency The second petition unfolds in precise economic language: "give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is my portion" (leḥem ḥuqqî, literally "my prescribed bread" or "bread of my statute/allotment"). The word ḥōq (statute, allotment, portion) is the same root used in liturgical and legal contexts throughout the Torah — it carries connotations of divinely ordained measure, of what is fitting and sufficient. Agur is not asking for comfort; he is asking to live within the order God has established for him.
The dual rationale in verse 9 is theologically devastating in its honesty:
The Typological and Spiritual Senses Patristically and typologically, Agur's "bread of my portion" (leḥem ḥuqqî) resonates powerfully with the petition for "daily bread" (ἄρτον ἐπιούσιον) in the Lord's Prayer. Both prayers ask for sufficiency rather than abundance; both locate the petitioner in a posture of creaturely dependence. The Fathers saw in ἐπιούσιος (translated variously as "daily," "necessary," "supersubstantial") a layered meaning that encompassed both physical sustenance and the Eucharistic Bread — the bread that is truly sufficient, truly "our portion." Agur's prayer thus becomes a type of the Our Father, and his "prescribed bread" a shadow of the Bread of Life.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage at several interlocking levels.
On Truthfulness: The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the virtue of truthfulness gives another just man his rightful due" and that "living in the truth" is inseparable from a life oriented toward God (CCC 2468–2470). Agur's prayer for removal from falsehood is not merely ethical hygiene; it is a petition for the precondition of authentic worship. You cannot rightly address a God from whom you habitually hide or distort reality. St. Augustine, whose entire Confessions is structured around the movement from self-deception to truth before God, would recognize in Agur a kindred soul: "Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee" (Conf. I.1) — but a restless heart armored in falsehood cannot come to rest at all.
On Sufficiency and Detachment: The Church's social teaching, articulated in Gaudium et Spes (§69) and Centesimus Annus (§36), affirms the "universal destination of goods" and warns that the accumulation of wealth beyond one's need constitutes a form of injustice. Agur's prayer anticipates this: he does not merely prefer modesty; he identifies excess wealth as a spiritual threat to his covenant fidelity. St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the virtue of temperance and its subspecies sobrietas (sobriety/moderation), notes that the rightly ordered person desires goods secundum mensuram rationis — according to the measure of reason and one's true need (ST II-II, q. 141).
On the Divine Name: Agur's fear of "profaning the name of my God" connects directly to the Second Commandment and the Catholic teaching on the reverence owed to God's name (CCC 2142–2149). The name of God is not merely a label but the site of divine self-disclosure; to dishonor it — whether through wealth-induced denial or poverty-induced theft — is to rupture one's relationship with the One who has revealed Himself.
Agur's prayer is a corrective to two characteristic temptations of contemporary Catholic life. The first is the prosperity-inflected Christianity that equates God's blessing with material abundance, where wealth becomes evidence of divine favor and "more" is always interpreted as "better." Agur names this directly: fullness breeds the practical atheism of self-sufficiency — the comfortable life in which God becomes optional. The second temptation is subtler: the assumption that poverty automatically ennobles. Agur is honest enough to admit that destitution also creates its own moral pressures.
The practical application is twofold. First, examine your relationship to sufficiency: not as an abstract virtue but concretely. What is "enough" for your household? Have you ever actually prayed — as Agur prays — to be given no more than your portion? Second, the prayer for removal from falsehood is urgently personal. Before the Eucharist, before Confession, before any serious prayer, ask yourself: Am I approaching God from within a tissue of comfortable self-deceptions? Agur's prayer makes an excellent daily examination of conscience: Have I been honest today — with God, with others, with myself?
Commentary