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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Proverbs 21:9 - 21:9
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The group now following extends to Pro 21:18, where a new one begins with a variation of its initial verse.
9 Better to sit on the pinnacle of a house-roof,
Than a contentious wife and a house in common.
We have neither to supplement the second line: than with a contentious wife... (Symmachus, Theodotion, Jerome, Luther), nor: than that one have a contentious...; but the meaning is, that sitting on the roof-top better befits one, does better than a quarrelsome wife and a common house (rightly the Targ. and Venet.), i.e., in a common house; for the connecting together of the wife and the house by vav is a Semitic hendiadys, a juxtaposition of two ideas which our language would place in a relation of subordination (Fleischer). This hendiadys would, indeed, be scarcely possible if the idea of the married wife were attached to אֵושׁת; for that such an one has with her husband a “house of companionship, i.e., a common house,” is self-evident. But may it not with equal right be understood of the imperious positive mother-in-law of a widower, a splenetic shrewish aunt, a sickly female neighbour disputing with all the world, and the like? A man must live together with his wife in so far as he does not divorce her; he must then escape from her; but a man may also be constrained by circumstances to live in a house with a quarrelsome mother-in-law, and such an one may, even during the life of his wife, and in spite of her affection, make his life so bitter that he would rather, in order that he might have rest, sit on the pinnacle or ridge of a house-roof. פִּנָּהּ is the battlement (Zep 1:16) of the roof, the edge of the roof, or its summit; he who sits there does so not without danger, and is exposed to the storm, but that in contrast with the alternative is even to be preferred; he sits alone. Regarding the Chethı̂b מִדְיָנִים, Kerı̂ מִדְיָנִים, vid., at Pro 6:14; and cf. the figures of the “continual dropping” for the continual scolding of such a wife, embittering the life of her husband, Pro 19:13.