womb and the earth, so here feminarium cupiditas and the ocean. The parallelizing of ארץ and רחם is after passages such as Psa 139:15; Job 1:21 (cf. also Pro 5:16; Num 24:7; Isa 48:1); that of שׁאול and אשׁ is to be judged of[1] after passages such as Deu 32:22, Isa 56:1-12 :24. That לא אמרו הון repeats itself in לא אמרה הון is now, as we render the proverb independently, much more satisfactory than if it began with 'שׁלושׁ וגו: it rounds itself off, for the end returns into the beginning. Regarding הון, vid., Pro 1:13. From הוּן, to be light, it signifies living lightly; ease, superabundance, in that which renders life light or easy. “Used accusatively, and as an exclamation, it is equivalent to plenty! enough! It is used in the same sense in the North African Arab. brrakat (spreading out, fulness). Wetzstein remarks that in Damascus lahôn i.e., hitherto, is used in the sense of ḥajah, enough; and that, accordingly, we may attempt to explain הון of our Heb. language in the sense of (Arab.) hawn haddah, i.e., here the end of it!” (Mühlau).
But what do we now make of the two remaining lines of the proverb of the ‛Alûka? The proverb also in this division of two lines is a fragment. Ewald completes it, for to the one line, of which, according to his view, the fragment consists, he adds two:
The bloodsucker has two daughters, “Hither! hither!”
Three saying, “Hither, hither, hither the blood,
The blood of the wicked child.”
A proverb of this kind may stand in the O.T. alone: it sounds as if quoted from Grimm's Mährchen, and is a side-piece to Zappert's altdeutsch. Schlummerliede. Cannot the mutilation of the proverb be rectified in a less violent way without any self-made addition? If this is the case, that in Pro 30:15 and Pro 30:16, which now form one proverb, there are two melted together, only the first of which lies before us in a confused form, then this phenomenon is explained by supposing that the proverb of the ‛Alûka originally stood in this form:
The ‛Alûka has two daughters: Give! give! -
The under-world and the closing of the womb;
There are three that are never satisfied.
Thus completed, this tristich presents itself as the original side-
- ↑ The parallelizing of רחם and שׁאול, Berachoth 15b, is not directly aimed at by the poet.
