Verse 15
Pro 17:15 15 He that acquitteth the guilty and condemneth the righteous - An abomination to Jahve are they both.
The proverb is against the partisan judge who is open to bribery, like Pro 24:24, cf. Isa 5:23, where, with reference to such, the announcement of punishment is emphatically made. רשׁע and צדּיק, in a forensic sense, are equivalent to sons (reus) and insons. גּם (cf. the Arab. jmy'na, altogether, but particularly the Pers. ham and the Turkish dkhy standing wholly thus in the numeral) is here, as at Gen 27:45, equivalent to יחדּיו, Jer 46:12 (in its unions = united). Whoever pronounces sentence of justification on the guilty, appears as if he must be judged more mildly than he who condemns the guiltless, but both the one and the other alike are an abhorrence to God.
We take Pro 17:16-21 together. This group beings with a proverb of the heartless, and ends with one of the perverse-hearted; and between these there are not wanting noticeable points of contact between the proverbs that follow one another.
Verse 16
Pro 17:16 16 Why the ready money in the hand of the fool; To get wisdom when he has yet no heart?
The question is made pointed by זה, thus not: why the ready money when...? Is it to obtain wisdom? - the whole is but one question, the reason of which is founded in לבו אין (thus to be accented with Mugrash going before).[1]
The fool, perhaps, even makes some endeavours, for he goes to the school of the wise, to follow out their admonitions, קנה חכמה (Pro 4:5, etc.), and it costs him something (Pro 4:7), but all to no purpose, for he has no heart. By this it is not meant that knowledge, for which he pays his honorarium, remains, it may be, in his head, but goes not to his heart, and thus becomes an unfruitful theory; but the heart is equivalent to the understanding, in the sense in which the heart appears as the previous condition to the attainment of wisdom (Pro 18:15), and as something to be gained before all (Pro 15:32), viz., understanding, as the fitting intellectual and practical habitus to the reception, the
- ↑ If we write ולב־ with Makkeph, then we have to accentuate לקנות חכמה with Tarcha Munach, because the Silluk word in this writing has not two syllables before the tone. This sequence of accents if found in the Codd. Ven. 1521, 1615, Basel 1619, while most editions have לקנות חכמה ולב־אין, which is false. But according to MSS we have ולב without Makkeph, and that is right according to the Makkeph rules of the metrical Accentuationssystem; vid., Torath Emeth, p. 40.
