Proverbs 25:27

Proverbs 25:27. It is not good to eat much honey— See on Pro 25:16 and Isaiah 7:15. Delicious as honey is to an eastern palate, it has been thought sometimes to have produced terrible effects. Thus Sanutus in the Gesta Dei per Francos, informs us, that the English who attended Edward I. into the Holy Land died in great numbers, as they marched in June to demolish a place; which he ascribes to the excessive heats, and their intemperate eating of fruits and honey. This, perhaps, may give us the thought of Solomon, contained in this verse. He had before in Pro 25:17 mentioned, that an excess in eating honey occasioned sickness and vomiting; but if it was thought sometimes to produce deadly effects, there is a greater energy in the instruction. However that be, this circumstance seems to illustrate the prophetic passage which speaks of a book sweet in the mouth as a morsel of honey, but after it was down producing pain, bitter as those gripings which the army of Coeur-de-Lion felt in the Holy Land, from eating honey to excess; for of such disorders as are the common effects of intemperance with respect to fruit in those climates, Sanutus appears to be speaking; and the bloody-flux, attended with griping pains, is well-known to be the great complaint. See the Observations, p. 160.