Proverbs 12:21 ('there shall no evil happen to the just') implies a strict retribution principle whereby all suffering reflects the sufferer's guilt — meaning, absurdly and monstrously, that a dead infant's death would be evidence of its own or its family's wickedness.

This reads a wisdom-genre generalization as an exceptionless universal law, a category error the biblical text itself resists. Proverbs, like its ANE wisdom-literature parallels (the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, Mesopotamian wisdom texts), states general, typical patterns of the moral order — observational maxims for shaping character, not metaphysical guarantees (Bruce Waltke and Tremper Longman's commentaries stress this genre point explicitly; compare Prov 22:6, 'train up a child... he will not depart from it,' universally read even by conservative interpreters as a general tendency, not an ironclad promise). Crucially, the canon itself supplies the corrective to a naive, exceptionless reading: the Book of Job is a sustained 42-chapter argument against precisely the equation 'suffering = personal sin.' Job's friends repeatedly assert the retribution principle rigidly, and God explicitly rebukes them at the end: 'ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath' (Job 42:7-8). Ecclesiastes likewise frankly observes the wicked prospering and the righteous perishing (Eccl 7:15, 8:14) from within the same wisdom corpus. Scripture is not naive here; it contains a deliberate canonical dialectic between Proverbs' general-pattern wisdom and the acknowledged exceptions voiced in Job, Ecclesiastes, and the lament Psalms (e.g. Ps 73). On infant death specifically, the proverb addresses moral agents capable of righteousness or wickedness; it has no in-genre application to an infant's death, an inference imported by the objector rather than asserted by the text.

The canon's honest inclusion of counter-voices (Job, Ecclesiastes, lament Psalms) alongside general wisdom maxims models a mature theology of suffering that refuses both naive prosperity-doctrine and nihilistic despair — holding real moral order (wisdom generally does lead to flourishing) together with real, unexplained innocent suffering (Job), and pointing beyond mechanical retribution to trust in a good God whose ways exceed human accounting (Job 38-42), a stance the NT deepens at the cross, where the most righteous person who ever lived suffers most unjustly.