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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Proverbs 10:6 - 10:6
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
There now follow two proverbs regarding the blessings and the curses which come to men, and which flow forth from them. Here, however, as throughout, we take each proverb by itself, that it might not appear as if we had a tetrastich before us. The first of these two antithetic distichs is:
Blessings (come) on the head of the just;
But violence covereth the mouth of the godless.
Blessings are, without being distinguished, bestowed as well as prayed for from above. Regarding the undistinguished uses of לְראֹשׁ (of a recompense of reward), בְּראֹשׁ (of penal recompense), and עַל־רֹאשׁ (especially of punishment), vid., under Gen 49:26. If we understand, with Ewald, Bertheau, Elster, Zöckler, and others, the two lines after Pro 10:11, Pro 19:28, cf. Pro 10:18 : the mouth of the wicked covers (hides under a mask) violence, inasmuch as he speaks words of blessing while thoughts of malediction lurk behind them (Psa 62:5), then we renounce the sharpness of the contrast. On the contrary, it is preserved if we interpret וּפִי as object: the violence that has gone out from it covereth the mouth of the wicked, i.e., it falls back upon his foul mouth; or as Fleischer (and Oetinger almost the same) paraphrases it: the deeds of violence that have gone forth from them are given back to them in curses and maledictions, so that going back they stop, as it were, their mouth, they bring them to silence; for it is unnecessary to take פִי synecdochically for פני (cf. e.g., Psa 69:8), since in בְּרָכוֹת 6a are perhaps chiefly meant blessings of thankful acknowledgment on the part of men, and the giving prominence to the mouth of the wicked from which nothing good proceeds is well accounted for. The parallels do not hinder us thus to explain, since parts of proverbs repeating themselves in the Book of Proverbs often show a change of the meaning (vid., p. 24f.). Hitzig's conjecture, יִכָּסֶה (better יְכֻסֶּה), is unnecessary; for elsewhere we read, as here, that חמס (violence), jure talionis, covers, יְכָּסֶּה, the wicked, Hab 2:17, or that he, using “violence,” therewith covers the whole of his external appearance, i.e., gives to it the branded impress of the unrighteousness he has done (vid., Köhler under Mal 2:16).