self-contentment, which is, in truth, the worst poverty, Rev 3:17; for life without God is a constant hunger and thirst. There is in worldly things, even the most pleasing, a dissatisfaction felt, and a dissatisfaction awakening disgust; and in spiritual life, a satiety which supposes itself to be full of life, but which is nothing else than the decay of life, than the changing of life into death.
Verse 8
Pro 27:8 8 As a bird that wandereth from her nest, So is a man that wandereth from his home.
It is not a flying out that is meant, from which at any moment a return is possible, but an unwilling taking to flight (lxx 8b: ὅταν ἀποξενωθῇ; Venet.: πλανούμενον ... πλανούμενος); for עוף נודד, Isa 16:2, cf. Jer 4:25, birds that have been frightened; and נדד, Pro 21:15., designates the fugitive; cf. נע ונד, Gen 4:14, and above, Pro 26:2, where נוּד designates aimless roving about. Otherwise Fleischer: “warning against unnecessary roaming about, in journeyings and wanderings far from home: as a bird far from its nest is easily wounded, caught, or killed, so, on such excursions, one easily comes to injury and want. One may think of a journey in the East. The Arabs say, in one of their proverbs: âlsafar ḳaṭ'at man âlklyym (= journeying is a part of the pains of hell).” But נדד here is not to be understood in the sense of a libere vagari. Rightly C. B. Michaelis: qui vagatur extorris et exul a loco suo sc. natali vel habitationis ordinariae. This proverb mediately recommends the love of one's fatherland, i.e., “love to the land in which our father has his home; on which our paternal mansion stands; in which we have spent the years of our childhood, so significant a part of one's whole life; from which we have derived our bodily and intellectual nourishment; and in which home we recognise bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”[1]
But next it says, that to be in a strange land must be an unhappiness, because a man never feels better than at home, as the bird in its nest. We say: Heimat [home] - this beautiful word becomes the German language, which has also coined the expressive idea of Heimweh [longing for home]; the
- ↑ Gustave Baur's article “Vaterlandsliebe,” in Schmid's Pädagogischer Encyklopädie.
