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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Job 31:31 - 31:31
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
31 If the people of my tent were not obliged to say:
Where would there be one who has not been satisfied with his flesh?! -
32 The stranger did not lodge out of doors,
I opened my door towards the street.
Instead of אָֽמְרוּ, it might also be יֹאמְרוּ (dicebant); the perf., however, better denotes not merely what happens in a general way, but what must come to pass. The “people of the tent” are all who belong to it, like the Arab. ahl (tent, metonym. dwellers in the tent), here pre-eminently the servants, but without the expression in itself excluding wife, children, and relations. The optative מִי־יִתֵּן, so often spoken of already, is here, as in Job 31:35; Job 14:4; Job 29:2, followed by the acc. objecti, for נִשְׂבָּע is part. with the long accented a (quis exhibebit or exhibeat non saturatum), and מִבְּשָׂרֹו is not meant of the flesh of the person (as even the lxx in bad taste renders: that his maids would have willingly eaten him, their kind master, up from love to him), but of the flesh of the cattle of the host. Our translation follows the accentuation, which, however, perhaps proceeds from an interpretation like that of Arnheim given above. His constant and ready hospitality is connected with the mention of his abundant care and provision for his own household. It is unnecessary to take אֹרַח, with the ancient versions, for אֹרֵחַ, or so to read it; לָאֹרַח signifies towards the street, where travellers are to be expected, comp. Pirke aboth i. 5: ”May thy house be open into the broad place (לָֽרְוָחָה), and may the poor be thy guests.” The Arabs pride themselves on the exercise of hospitality. “To open a guest-chamber” is the same as to establish one's own household in Arabic. Stories of judgments by which the want of hospitality has been visited, form an important element of the popular traditions of the Arabs.
(Note: In the spring of 1860 - relates Wetzstein - as I came out of the forest of Gôlan, I saw the water of Râm lying before us, that beautiful round crater in which a brook that runs both summer and winter forms a clear but fishless lake, the outflow of which underground is recognised as the fountain of the Jordan, which breaks forth below in the valley out of the crater Tell el-Kadi; and I remarked to my companion, the physician Regeb, the unusual form of the crater, when my Beduins, full of astonishment, turned upon me with the question, “What have you Franks heard of the origin of this lake?” On being asked what they knew about it, they related how that many centuries ago a flourishing village once stood here, the fields of which were the plain lying between the water and the village of Megdel Shems. One evening a poor traveller came while the men were sitting together in the open place in the middle of the village, and begged for a supper and a resting-place for the night, which they refused him. When he assured them that he had eaten nothing since the day before, an old woman amidst general laughter reached out a gelle (a cake of dried cow-dung, which is used for fuel), and drove him out of the village. Thereupon the man went to the village of Nimra (still standing, south of the lake), where he related his misfortune, and was taken in by them. The next morning, when the inhabitants of Nimra woke, they found a lake where the neighbouring village had stood.)