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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Proverbs 10:5 - 10:5
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
There is now added a proverb which, thus standing at the beginning of the collection, and connecting itself with Pro 10:1, stamps on it the character of a book for youth:
He that gathereth in summer is a wise son;
But he that is sunk in sleep in the time of harvest is a son that causeth shame.
Von Hofmann (Schriftb. ii. 2. 403) rightly interprets בֵּן מַשְׂכִּיל and בֵּן מֵבִישׁ, with Cocceius and others, as the subject, and not with Hitzig as predicate, for in nominal clauses the rule is to place the predicate before the subject; and since an accurate expression of the inverted relation would both times require הוא referring to the subject, so we here abide by the usual syntax: he that gathers in summer time is... Also the relation of the members of the sentence, Pro 19:26, is a parallel from which it is evident that the misguided son is called מבישׁ as causing shame, although in הבישׁ the idea to put to shame (= to act so that others are ashamed) and to act shamefully (disgracefully), as in השׂכיל the ideas to have insight and to act intelligently, lie into one another (cf. Pro 14:35); the root-meaning of השׂכיל is determined after שֵׂכֶל, which from שָׂכַל, complicare, designates the intellect as the faculty of intellectual configuration. בּוֹשׁ, properly disturbari, proceeds from a similar conception as the Lat. confundi (pudore). קַיִץ and קָצִיר fall together, for קיץ (from קוץ = qât, to be glowing hot) is just the time of the קציר; vid., under Gen 8:22. To the activity of a thoughtful ingathering, אָגַר, for a future store (vid., Pro 6:7), stands opposed deep sleep, i.e., the state of one sunk in idleness. נִרְדַּם means, as Schultens has already shown, somno penitus obrui, omni sensu obstructo et oppilato quasi, from רָדַם, to fill, to shut up, to conclude; the derivation (which has been adopted since Gesenius) from the Arab. word having the same sound, rdm, stridere, to shrill, to rattle (but not stertere, to snore), lies remote in the Niph., and also contradicts the usage of the word, according to which it designates a state in which all free activity is bound, and all reference to the external world is interrupted; cf. תַּרְדֵּמָה, Pro 19:15, of dulness, apathy, somnolency in the train of slothfulness. The lxx has here one distich more than the Hebr. text.