Proverbs 30:18-19

18, 19. Too wonderful As we have in the preceding verses several illustrations of the insatiable, so we have in these examples of the mysterious. The mystery of these things (as commonly supposed) is not so much in themselves as in the discovery of them afterward “the impossibility of tracing the way gone over.” Stuart. There is a various reading in the last of the four particulars the correctness of which is maintained by very respectable critics. Instead of עלמה , ( ‘ halmah,) a maid, a marriageable virgin, some manuscripts and versions read עלומיו , ( ‘ halu-mayv,) his youth, “the way of a man in his youth.” So the Septuagint, Vulgate, Arabic, etc. Some illustrate this passage thus: In countries where young women are kept secluded there is little opportunity of personal acquaintance, and of what we call courtship. There are few chances by which a young man can personally engage the affections of a young woman. She is not at her own disposal, and can but acquiesce in the choice of her parents and friends. “I have often been surprised,” says a certain writer, “to see with what little regret a lover, proposed to a virgin, has been abandoned by her for another, perhaps not at all better. She transfers her connexion and person with so little difficulty to the latter’s proposal, that however she might have encouraged the first, and even have adopted him as her husband elect, he appears to have left no more trace on her mind than the eagle leaves in the air.” TAYLOR’S Calmet, under Al-mah. All this may be so, but it seems to be the way of a maid with a man, rather than, as the text demands, the way of a man with a maid.

Conant’s note on “difficult things” is worthy of consideration. “It matters not that these things can be philosophically explained, and that we now understand how the eagle is sustained in the air by its reacting force, and moves upward or onward by the difference of forces. So can the ‘balancings of the clouds’ (Job 37:16) be now understood. The discovery that the air has weight, and is heavier than the pellicles of vapour, has explained the mystery. But there was a time when these were wonders, and to men as wise at least as we are in matters of greater concern than the truths of physical science. We all can remember when to us, too, they were wonders; and no illustrations of truth take stronger hold of the imagination and the heart than those drawn from our earliest impressions of nature. The Bible abounds in them, and in this is one secret of its hold on the human heart.”

Not less incomprehensible is the mysterious law of reproduction in the divinely appointed relation of the sexes. In purposed contrast with what follows, we have here the case of the bridegroom and bride, and their chaste intercourse, as a type of the sanctity and purity of that relation, for by “maid” is meant a young woman of marriageable age.