Attributed commentary excerpt
Keil & Delitzsch on Proverbs 9:1
A historical reference excerpt for this verse. Read it alongside the biblical text and other available sources.
Commentary on the Old Testament
C. F. Keil & F. Delitzsch · 19th-century historical commentary
Source: BibleWord.ai's local reference edition of this named work.
The preceding discourse pronounces those happy who, having taken their stand at the portal of Wisdom, wait for her appearance and her invitation. There is thus a house of Wisdom as there is a house of God, Psa 84:11; and if now the discourse is of a house of Wisdom, and of an invitation to a banquet therein (like that in the parable, Matt 22, of the invitation to the marriage feast of the king's son), it is not given without preparation: 1 Wisdom hath builded for herself an house, Hewn out her seven pillars; 2 Hath slaughtered her beasts, mingled her wine; Hath also spread her table; 3 Hath sent out her maidens; she waiteth On the highest points of the city. Pro 9:1 Regarding חכמות, vid., at Pro 1:20. It is a plur. excellentiae, which is a variety of the plur. extensivus. Because it is the expression of a plural unity, it stands connected (as for the most part also אלהים, Deus) with the sing. of the predicate. The perfects enumerate all that Wisdom has done to prepare for her invitation. If we had a parable before us, the perf. would have run into the historical ותּשׁלח; but it is, as the תקרא shows, an allegorical picture of the arrangement and carrying out of a present reality. Instead of בּנתה לּהּ בּית there is בּנתה בּיתהּ, for the house is already in its origin represented as hers, and 1b is to be translated: she has hewn out her seven pillars (Hitzig); more correctly: her pillars, viz., seven (after the scheme דבּתם רעה, Gen 37:2); but the construction is closer. שׁבעה is, altogether like Exo 25:37, the accusative of the second object, or of the predicate after the species of verba, with the idea: to make something, turn into something, which take to themselves a double accusative, Gesen. 139, 2: excidit columnas suas ita ut septem essent. Since the figure is allegorical, we may not dispense with the interpretation of the number seven by the remark, "No emphasis lies in the number" (Bertheau). First, we must contemplate architecturally the house with seven pillars: "They are," as Hitzig rightly remarks, "the pillars of the מסדּרון (porch) \vid. Bachmann under [Jdg 3:23, and Wetstein under Psa 144:12, where חטב is used of the cutting out and hewing of wood, as חצב of the cutting out and hewing of stone\] in the inner court, which bore up the gallery of the first (and second) floors: four of these in the corners and three in the middle of three sides; through the midst of these the way led into the court of the house-floor the area." But we cannot agree with Hitzig in maintaining that, with the seven pillars of chap. 8 and 9, the author looks back to the first seven chapters (Arab. âbwab, gates) of this book; we think otherwise of the component members of this Introduction to the Book of Proverbs; and to call the sections of a book "gates, שׁערים," is a late Arabico-Jewish custom, of which there is found no trace whatever in the O.T. To regard them also, with Heidenheim (cf. Dante's Prose Writings, translated by Streckfuss, p. 77), as representing the seven liberal arts (שׁבע חכמות) is impracticable; for this division of the artes liberales into seven, consisting of the Trivium (Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectics) and Quadrivium (Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy), is not to be looked for within the old Israelitish territory, and besides, these were the sciences of this world which were so divided; but wisdom, to which the discourse here refers, is wholly a religious-moral subject. The Midrash thinks of the seven heaven…
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