effects (Pro 5:17) may belong to thee alone, viz., to thee alone (לבדּך, properly in thy separateness) within thy married relation, not, as thou hast fellowship with other women, to different family circles, Aben-Ezra rightly regards as the subject, for he glosses thus: הפלגים שׁהם הבנים הבשׁרים, and Immanuel well explains יהיוּ־לך by יתיחסו לך. The child born out of wedlock belongs not to the father alone, he knows not to whom it belongs; its father must for the sake of his honour deny it before the world. Thus, as Grotius remarks: ibi sere ubi prolem metas. In ואין the יהיו is continued. It is not thus used adverbially for לא, as in the old classic Arabic lyas for l' (Fl.), but it carries in it the force of a verb, so that יהיו, according to rule, in the sense of ולא היו = ולא יהיו, continues it.
Verses 18-20
With Pro 5:18 is introduced anew the praise of conjugal love. These three verses, Pro 5:18-21, have the same course of thought as Pro 5:15-17. 18 Let thy fountain be blessed, And rejoice in the wife of thy youth. 19 The lovely hind and the graceful gazelle - May her bosom always charm thee; In her love mayest thou delight thyself evermore. 20 But why wilt thou be fascinated with a stranger, And embrace the bosom of a foreign woman?
Like בור and באר, מקור is also a figure of the wife; the root-word is קוּר, from קר, כר, the meanings of which, to dig and make round, come together in the primary conception of the round digging out or boring out, not קוּר = קרר, the Hiph. of which means (Jer 6:7) to well out cold (water). It is the fountain of the birth that is meant (cf. מקור of the female ערוה, e.g., Lev 20:18), not the procreation (lxx, ἡ σὴ φλέψ, viz., φλὲψ γονίμη); the blessing wished for by him is the blessing of children, which בּרוּך so much the more distinctly denotes if בּרך, Arab. barak, means to spread out, and בּרך thus to cause a spreading out. The מן, 18b, explains itself from the idea of drawing (water), given with the figure of a fountain; the word בּאשׁת found in certain codices is, on the contrary, prosaic (Fl.). Whilst שׂמח מן is found elsewhere (Ecc 2:20; 2Ch 20:27) as meaning almost the same as שׂמח בּ; the former means rejoicing from some place, the latter in something. In the genitive connection, “wife of thy youth” (cf. Pro 2:17), both of these significations lie: thy youthful wife, and she who was chosen by thee in thy youth, according as we refer the suffix to the whole idea or only to the second member of the chain of words.
