Proverbs 30:16

16. The grave, etc. These four things are given as examples of insatiableness. The learner is left to apply them for himself, as for instance, to the miser, the drunkard, the glutton, the debauchee. This passage is reckoned among the hhidhoth (enigmas) of the book. Compare Proverbs 1:6. Barren womb Miller renders, allowably, “The enclosure of the womb.” It is the same word elsewhere translated “ prison,” as in Isaiah 53:8. He adds: “The idea of special insatiableness in the barren seems to be a physiological fancy. Moreover the Hindus have a proverb of just these particulars in which we have nothing of sterility.” Conant says, “The natural desire for offspring (compare the only too passionate expression of it in Genesis 30:1, ‘ Give me children, or else I die,’) is certainly all that is here meant by the unsatisfied craving of the barren womb. It is not just to the sacred writer to impute to him any other thought.”