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 vanitatis, sive denique verbi otiosi. In 19b it is more appropriate to regard משׂכּיל as the present of the internal transitive (intelligenter agit) than to interpret it in the attributive sense (intelligens).

Verse 20
Pro 10:20 20 Choice silver is the tongue of the righteous;     But the heart of the godless is little worth. Choice silver is, as Pro 8:19, cf. 10, pure, freed from all base mixtures. Like it, pure and noble, is whatever the righteous speaks; the heart, i.e., the manner of thought and feeling, of the godless is, on the contrary, like little instar nihili, i.e., of little or no worth, Arab. yasway kâlyla (Fl.). lxx: the heart of the godless ἐκλείψει, i.e., ימעט, at first arrogant and full of lofty plans, it becomes always the more dejected, discouraged, empty. But 20a leads us to expect some designation of its worth. The Targ. (according to which the Peshito is to be corrected; vid., Levy's Wörterbuch, ii. 26): the heart of the godless is מחתא (from נחת), refuse, dross. The other Greek versions accord with the text before us.

Verse 21
Pro 10:21 21 The lips of the righteous edify many;     But fools die through want of understanding. The lxx translate 21a: the lips of the righteous ἐπίσταται ὑψηλά, which would at least require ידעו רבות. רעה is, like the post-bibl. pir|neec (vid., the Hebr. Römerbrief, p. 97), another figure for the N.T. οἰκοδομεῖν: to afford spiritual nourishment and strengthening, to which Fleischer compares the ecclesiastical expressions: pastor, ovile ecclesiae, les ouailles; רעה means leader, Jer 10:21, as well as teacher, Ecc 12:11, for it contains partly the prevailing idea of leading, partly of feeding. ירעוּ stands for תּרעינה, as Pro 10:32, Pro 5:2. In 21b, Bertheau incorrectly explains, as Euchel and Michaelis: stulti complures per dementem unum moriuntur; the food has truly enough in his own folly, and needs not to be first drawn by others into destruction. חסר is not here the connective form of חסר (Jewish interpreters: for that reason, that he is such an one), nor of חסר (Hitzig, Zöckler), which denotes, as a concluded idea, penuria, but like רחב, Pro 21:4, שׁכב, Pro 6:10, and שׁפל, Pro 16:19, infin.: they die by want of understanding (cf. Pro 5:23); this amentia is the cause of their death, for it leads fools to meet destruction without their observing it (Hos 4:6).

Verse 22
Three proverbs which say that good comes from above, and is as a second nature to the man of understanding: