Proverbs 27:10
Don't forsake your friend and your father's friend. Don't go to your brother's house in the day of your disaster: better is a neighbor who is near than a distant brother.
WEB
Thine own friend, and thy father’s friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother’s house in the day of thy calamity: for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.
KJV
What Proverbs 27:10 means
The verse tells you to keep up the friendships you inherited, and it says that on the day your life collapses, a neighbor who lives close enough to reach you is worth more than a brother who lives too far away to come.
The saying belongs to the second collection of Solomon's proverbs, chapters 25 through 29, which the book itself credits to the men of Hezekiah king of Judah, scribes who gathered these lines generations after Solomon. Chapter 27 clusters sayings about friendship and candor: faithful are the wounds of a friend, the sweetness of a friend's counsel, iron sharpening iron. This proverb sits in that cluster and asks a blunter question. When everything falls in, who is close enough to reach you?
Ancient Israel was organized by clan. The extended family held the land, defended the name, and served as the only insurance anyone had. The kinsman-redeemer existed precisely to buy back a relative's field or freedom. Proverbs honors that structure everywhere else, which is what makes this line startling. Roads were slow and disaster was fast. A brother two days' journey away is still two days away, and the neighbor across the courtyard is already standing there. The verse also treats friendship as an inheritance: your father's friend is your obligation, a bond carried across generations.
The Hebrew turns on a word for space. The friend at the opening is rea', a companion. The one preferred at the end is shakhen, a dweller, someone whose house is near yours. The translation says neighbor, and the word means that literally. The catastrophe is yom 'ed, the day of ruin, the kind that arrives without warning. On that day, nearness stops being a detail and becomes the difference between help and no help.