On the surface of it, these four proverbs don’t seem to have a common thread. All of them land squarely in the category of the blindingly obvious: of course it’s unfair to punish the innocent! Probably they weren’t really intended to be read as a unit, as this section of Proverbs is really a list of Solomon’s wisdom aphorisms. So why does he remind us of things we already know?

Justice is, most often, inconvenient.