here is not to be otherwise interpreted, is to be concluded from אל with the causative rendering. Rightly Symmachus, μὴ διαβάλῃς; Theodotion, μὴ καταλαλήσῃς; and according to the sense also, Jerome, ne accuses; the Venet. μὴ καταμηνύσῃς (give not him); on the contrary, Luther, verrate nicht [betray not], renders הלשׁין with the lxx, Syr. in the sense of the Aram. אשׁלם and the Arab. âslam (tradere, prodere). One should not secretly accuse (Psa 101:5) a servant with his master, and in that lies the character of slander (לשׁון הרע) when one puts suspicion upon him, or exaggerates the actual facts, and generally makes the person suspected - one thereby makes a man, whose lot in itself is not a happy one, at length and perhaps for ever unhappy, and thereby he brings a curse on himself. But it is no matter of indifference to be the object of the curse of a man whom one has unrighteously and unjustly overwhelmed in misery: such a curse is not without its influence, for it does not fruitlessly invoke the righteous retribution of God, and thus one has sorrowfully to atone for the wanton sins of the tongue (veaschāmta, for ve-aschamtá as it is would be without pause).
Verses 11-14
There now follows a Priamel,[1] the first line of which is, by יקלל, connected with the יקללך of the preceding distich: 11 A generation that curseth their father, And doth not bless their mother; 12 A generation pure in their own eyes, And yet not washed from their filthiness; 13 A generation - how haughty their eyes, And their eyelids lift themselves up; 14 A generation whose teeth are swords and their jaw teeth knives To devour the poor from the earth and the needy from the midst of men.
Ewald translates: O generation! but that would have required the word, 13a, הדּור (Jer 2:31), and one would have expected
- ↑ Cf. vol. i. p. 13. The name (from praeambulum) given to a peculiar form of popular gnomic poetry which prevailed in Germany from the 12th (e.g., the Meistersinger or Minstrel Sparvogel) to the 16th century, but was especially cultivated during the 14th and 15th centuries. Its peculiarity consisted in this, that after a series of antecedents or subjects, a briefly-expressed consequent or predicate was introduced as the epigrammatic point applicable to all these antecedents together. Vid., Erschenburg's Denkmälern altdeutscher Dichtkinst, Bremen 1799.
