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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Proverbs 30:2 - 30:2
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The כי now following confirms the fruitlessness of the long zealous search:
2 For I am without reason for a man,
And a man's understanding I have not.
3 And I have not learned wisdom,
That I may possess the knowledge of the All-Holy.
He who cannot come to any fixed state of consecration, inasmuch as he is always driven more and more back from the goal he aims at, thereby brings guilt upon himself as a sinner so great, that every other man stands above him, and he is deep under them all. So here Agur finds the reason why in divine things he has failed to attain unto satisfying intelligence, not in the ignorance and inability common to all men - he appears to himself as not a man at all, but as an irrational beast, and he misses in himself the understanding which a man properly might have and ought to have. The מִן of מֵאִישׁ is not the partitive, like Isa 44:11, not the usual comparative: than any one (Böttcher), which ought to be expressed by מִכָּל־אִישׁ, but it is the negative, as Isa 52:14; Fleischer: rudior ego sum quam ut homo appeller, or: brutus ego, hominis non similis. Regarding בַּעַר, vid., under Pro 12:1.
(Note: According to the Arab. בעיר is not a beast as grazing, but as dropping stercus (ba'r, camel's or sheep's droppings); to the R. בר, Mühlau rightly gives the meanings of separating, whence are derived the meanings of grazing as well as of removing (cleansing) (cf. Pers. thak karadn, to make clean = to make clean house, tabula rasa).)
Pro 30:3 now says that he went into no school of wisdom, and for that reason in his wrestling after knowledge could attain to nothing, because the necessary conditions to this were wanting to him. But then the question arises: Why this complaint? He must first go to school in order to obtain, according to the word “To him who hath is given,” that for which he strove. Thus לָמַדְתִּי refers to learning in the midst of wrestling; but למד, spiritually understood, signifies the acquiring of a kennens [knowledge] or könnens [knowledge = ability]: he has not brought it out from the deep point of his condition of knowledge to make wisdom his own, so that he cannot adjudge to himself knowledge of the all-holy God (for this knowledge is the kernel and the star of true wisdom). If we read 3b לֹא אֵדָע, this would be synchronistic, nesciebam, with למדתי standing on the same line. On the contrary, the positive אדע subordinates itself to ולא־למדתי, as the Arab. fâa' lama, in the sense of (ita) ut scirem scientiam Sanctissimi, thus of a conclusion, like Lam 1:19, a clause expressive of the intention, Ewald, §347a. קְדשִׁים is, as at Pro 9:10, the name of God in a superlative sense, like the Arab. el-kuddûs.