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 good and bad effects of human speech. The seventeenth verse introduces the transition: 17 There is a way to life when one gives heed to correction;     And whoever disregards instruction runs into error. Instead of ארח חיּים (Pro 5:6), there is here ארח לחיים; and then this proverb falls into rank with Pro 10:16, which contains the same word לחיים. The accentuation denotes ארח as subst.; for ארח way, road = ארח [a wayfarer, part. of ארח] would, as שׁסע, Lev 11:7, נטע, Psa 94:9, have the tone on the ultima. It is necessary neither to change the tone, nor, with Ewald, to interpret ארח as ''abstr. pro concreto, like הלך, for the expression “wanderer to life” has no support in the Mishle''. Michaelis has given the right interpretation: via ad vitam est si quis custodiat disciplinam. The syntactical contents, however, are different, as e.g., 1Sa 2:13, where the participle has the force of a hypothetical clause; for the expression: “a way to life is he who observes correction,” is equivalent to: he is on the way to life who...; a variety of the manner of expression: “the porch was twenty cubits,” 2Ch 3:4, particularly adapted to the figurative language of proverbial poetry, as if the poet said: See there one observant of correction - that (viz., the שׁמר [שׁמר, to watch] representing itself in this שׁמר) is the way to life. מוּסר and תּוכחת are related to each other as παιδεία and ἔλεγχος; עזב [עזב, to leave, forsake] is equivalent to בּלתּי שׁמר. מתעה would be unsuitable as a contrast in the causative sense: who guides wrong, according to which Bertheau understands 17a, that only he who observes correction can guide others to life. We expect to hear what injuries he who thinks to raise himself above all reproach brings on himself. Hitzig, in his Commentary (1858), for this reason places the Hithpa. מתּעה (rather write מתּעה) in the place of the Hiph.; but in the ''Comm. on Jeremiah (1866), 42:20, he rightly remarks: “To err, not as an involuntary condition, but as an arbitrary proceeding, is suitably expressed by the Hiph''.” In like manner הוסיף, הגּיע (to touch), הרחיק (to go to a distance), denote the active conduct of a being endowed with reason; Ewald, §122, c. Jewish interpreters gloss מתעה by supplying נפשׁו; but it signifies only as inwardly transitive, to accomplish the action of the תּעות.

Verse 18
Pro 10:18 18 He that hideth hatred is a mouth of falsehood;     And he that spreadeth slander is a fool. The lxx, καλύπτουσιν ἔχθραν χεῖλα δίκαια, which Ewald prefers,