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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Proverbs 5:12 - 5:12
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The poet now tells those whom he warns to hear how the voluptuary, looking back on his life-course, passes sentence against himself.
12 And thou sayest, “Why have I then hated correction,
And my heart despised instruction!
13 And I have not listened to the voice of my teachers,
Nor lent mine ear to my instructors?
14 I had almost fallen into every vice
In the midst of the assembly and the congregation!”
The question 12a (here more an exclamation than a question) is the combination of two: How has it become possible for me? How could it ever come to it that.... Thus also one says in Arab.: Kyf f'alat hadhâ (Fl.). The regimen of אֵיךְ in 12b is becoming faint, and in 13b has disappeared. The Kal נָאַץ (as Pro 1:30; Pro 15:5) signifies to despise; the Piel intensively, to contemn and reject (R. נץ, pungere).
Pro 5:13
שָׁמַע בְּ signifies to cleave to anything in hearing, as רָאָה בְ is to do so in seeing; שָׁמַע לְ yet more closely corresponds with the classic ἐπακούειν, obedire, e.g., Psa 81:9; שָׁמַע בְּקוֹל is the usual phrase for “hearken!”
Pro 5:14
כִּמְעַט with the perf. following is equivalent to: it wanted but a little that this or that should happen, e.g., Gen 26:10. It is now for the most part thus explained: it wanted but a little, and led astray by that wicked companionship I would have been drawn away into crime, for which I would then have been subjected to open punishment (Fl.). Ewald understands רָע directly of punishment in its extreme form, stoning; and Hitzig explains כָל־רָע by “the totality of evil,” in so far as the disgraceful death of the criminal comprehends in it all other evils that are less. But בְּכָל־רָע means, either, into every evil, misfortune, or into every wickedness; and since רַע, in contradistinction to לב (Hitzig compares Eze 36:5), is a conception of a species, then the meaning is equivalent to in omni genere mali. The reference to the death-punishment of the adulteress is excluded thereby, though it cannot be denied that it might be thought of at the same time, if he who too late comes to consider his ways were distinctly designated in the preceding statements as an adulterer. But it is on the whole a question whether בכל־רע is meant of the evil which follows sin as its consequence. The usage of the language permits this, cf. 2Sa 16:8; Exo 5:19; 1Ch 7:23; Psa 10:6, but no less the reference to that which is morally bad, cf. Exo 32:22 (where Keil rightly compares with 1Jo 5:19); and הָיִיתִי (for which in the first case one expected נָפַלְתִּי, I fell into, vid., Pro 13:17; Pro 17:20; Pro 28:14) is even more favourable to the latter reference. Also בְּתוֹךְ קָהָל וְעֵדָה (cf. on the heaping together of synonyms under 11b), this paraphrase of the palam ac publice, with its בְּתוֹךְ (cf. Psa 111:1; 2Ch 20:14), looks rather to a heightening of the moral self-accusation. He found himself in all wickedness, living and moving therein in the midst of the congregation, and thereby giving offence to it, for he took part in the external worship and in the practices of the congregation, branding himself thereby as a hypocrite. That by the one name the congregation is meant in its civil aspect, and by the other in its ecclesiastical aspect, is not to be supposed: in the congregation of the people of the revealed law, the political and the religious sides are not so distinguished. It is called without distinction קָהָל and עֵדָה (from יָעַד). Rather we would say that קהל is the whole ecclesia, and עדה the whole of its representatives; but also the great general council bears sometimes the one name (Exo 12:3, cf. 21) and sometimes the other (Deu 31:30, cf. 28) - the placing of them together serves thus only to strengthen the conception.