A bribe is a charm to the one who gives it; wherever he turns, he succeeds (Proverbs 17:8).

Bribes are bad.  Aren't they?  Bribes mean greed and corruption and class inequality.  Bribes mean sneaky, make-sure-no-one-is-looking, underhanded wrongdoing.  Bribes would seem to mean so many things that God is not.  The majority of the biblical references speak against bribes (Exodus 23:8, Deuteronomy 10:17, Deuteronomy 16:19, 1 Samuel 8:3, 1 Samuel 12:3, 2 Chronicles 19:7, and Job 15:34, to name a few -- though by no means an exhaustive list).  Yet here in Proverbs 17:8, it seems that bribery is cast in a more favorable light:  "A bribe is a charm to the one who gives it; wherever he turns, he succeeds."

Isn't that weird?  Isn't that wrong?

Of course there's that whole argument about whether the Proverbs are prescriptive (telling us how things should be) or descriptive (telling us how things are).  Naturally, if we took Proverbs 17:8 to be descriptive, it would be quite correct:  that you may get a table faster if you slip the restaurant's host a 50, and that you may very well escape customs without harrassment if you bribe the officials (in many parts of the world, in fact, this is standard operating procedure).  Looking at it that way seems to be the easy way out, though.

The more I've been reading through the Proverbs, the more I've sensed that their general tone and purpose are to develop godly wisdom -- not just awareness -- and to provide moral instruction.  Thus, I would say that we'd do well to approach the Proverbs, both as a whole and as individual nuggets of truth, with a default assumption that they are prescriptive, and not just descriptive.  This may or may not hold true for each and every Proverb, but I believe it helps us to wrestle with the text in a much more meaningful way.  So -- if we were to evaluate Proverbs 17:8 from a prescriptive standpoint, what might we be able to learn?

First:  maybe not all bribes are bad bribes.  Maybe there are some situations where a bribe really is the only way.  Friends' stories of their travels in the developing world certainly make me wonder if this might be a possibility.  In these cases, perhaps, a bribe is no more insidious than a fee hidden in the fine print of an American contract or an unexpected tax levied by the government on some particular article or activity.  Some of these economic restrictions are simply unavoidable -- the cost of doing business -- so why should one culture's system be granted moral superiority over another culture's system?  In some cases, I wonder if a bribe might simply be a part of the cost of doing business.

Second:  What are the broader moral elements of a situation in which a bribe might actually be offered?  Why exactly does a bribe seem to grate against my conscience so heavily?  Because it seems to reward and perpetuate injustice!  At the end of the day, it's all about injustice.  In the majority of the biblical references to bribery, the thing that's actually being condemned is the injustice of it all.  So that makes me wonder:  could it be that there are some cases in which bribery is a means of drawing the attention of a powerful person to a situation which requires justice as only he can provide it -- whereas, otherwise, the case of injustice may simply be lost in a stack of paperwork?  This still seems wrong in some ways, to pay someone extra for a job they're already supposed to be doing; but again, I wonder if this may be the best way to see that justice is served after all.  Proverbs 17:23 (just 15 verses after our verse of the day) says, "A wicked man accepts a bribe in secret to pervert the course of justice."  But there, you see, this sort of bribery is condemned because of its perversion of justice.  If another sort of bribery -- perhaps the Proverbs 17:8 kind of bribery -- could actually prevent the perversion of justice, than maybe it's the better way to go.

I don't really know exactly what to do with the tension between Proverbs 17:8 and Proverbs 17:23, but it's very interesting food for thought.  As a whole, given the overwhelming body of evidence from Scripture, I'd suggest that we'd do well to stay away from bribery.  But then again, let's not just sweep Proverbs 17:8 under the rug either.  In some cases, it may very well be that a bribe is a charm to the one who gives it -- a key to success at every turn.  I guess we'll just have to trust the Holy Spirit to lead us in that, should the situation ever call for it.