Page:Keil and Delitzsch,Biblical commentary the old testament the pentateuch, trad James Martin, volume 1, 1885.djvu/1533

 planted by the water; whilst Moses fixes his eye primarily upon the land of Joseph, and desires for him the richest productions. “May his land be blessed by Jehovah from (מן of the cause of the blessing, whose author was Jehovah; vid., Psa 28:7; Psa 104:3) the most precious thing of the heaven.” מגד, which only occurs again in the Sol 4:13, Sol 4:16, and Sol 7:13, is applied to precious fruits. The most precious fruit which the heaven yields to the land is the dew. The “productions of the sun,” and גּרשׁ, ἅπ. λεγ. from גּרשׁ, “the produce of the moons,” are the fruits of the earth, which are matured by the influence of the sun and moon, by their light, their warmth. At the same time, we can hardly so distinguish the one from the other as to understand by the former the fruits which ripen only once a year, and by the latter those which grow several times and in difference months; and Eze 47:12 and Rev 22:2 cannot be adduced as proofs of this. The plural “moons” in parallelism with the sun does not mean months, as in Exo 2:2, but the different phases which the moon shows in its revolution round the earth. מראשׁ (from the head), in Deu 33:15, is a contracted expression signifying “from the most precious things of the head.” The most precious things of the head of the mountains of old and the eternal hills, are the crops and forests with which the tops of the mountains and hills are covered. Moses sums up the whole in the words, “the earth, and the fulness thereof:” everything in the form of costly good that the earth and its productions can supply. - To the blessings of the heaven and earth there are to be added the good-will of the Lord, who appeared to Moses in the thorn-bush to redeem His people out of the bondage and oppression of Egypt and bring it into the land of Canaan, the land flowing with milk and honey (Exo 3:2.). The expression “that dwells in the bush” is to be explained from the significance of this manifestation of God as shown at Ex 3, which shadowed forth a permanent relation between the Lord and His people. The spiritual blessing of the covenant grace is very suitably added to the blessings of nature; and there is something no less suitable in the way in which the construction commencing with וּרצון is dropped, so that an anakolouthon ensues. This word cannot be taken as an accusative of more precise definition, as Schultz supposes; nor is מן to be supplied before it, as Knobel suggests. Grammatically considered, it is a nominative to which the verb תּבואתה properly belongs, although, as a matter of fact, not only the good-will, but the natural blessings, of the Lord were also to come