For when your words have tasted bitter and you need to receive your spouse as favor.

The ancient proverb sets two baskets on a table: one holds death, the other life. Your tongue is the hand that reaches into one and feeds everyone who eats with you. Then the verse turns from the tongue to the table itself: whoever finds a wife finds a good thing, and obtains favor of Yahweh. The wife is not the fruit of your speech; she is the favor set before you, a gift that arrives while you are still deciding what to say.

Take the logic slowly. If I love the tongue, if I love my right to speak, to correct, to win, I will eat its fruit, and so will my wife, because we share one table. The good thing about a wife is not that she earns a gentle husband, but that she is favor from Yahweh, a blessing too large to be manufactured by eloquence. I confess I have served my wife cold portions of my own wounded pride and called it honesty. The fruit was death, and I ate it with her.

Jesus went to the cross and took into His own mouth the full bitter harvest of our death-words: every curse, every silent withdrawal, every clever cruelty. He swallowed it so that the table would not end in death. In His resurrection He gives us a new tongue, one that can speak life because He has already eaten the death for us. When your tongue serves death, the favor of a wife is still offered. Christ swallowed that death first, so the table is not a verdict but a place of grace.