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Bible Notes - Tabernacle Commentaries
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Proverbs 29:10
Comments
What is the problem here? It is man’s attitude to goodness, towards the blameless. So unsavoury are the righteous, the blameless, to the wicked that their very presence eats away at them, and they cannot bear to be in the same world as them. Ultimately this leads to the sin of Cain. The blameless are a reproach to the wicked, and the working of their consciences makes them so uncomfortable that they feel compelled rid themselves of those who love God and keep his commandments. How then is it that the world does not immediately disintegrate into all out bloodshed? The reason is that the enmity between unbeliever and believer does not instantly reach its full strength, because the unbeliever is not immediately aware of all that it means. He does not straightaway know the righteous, nor the implications of the difference between them. He does not understand, on day one, that there must be an eternal division between them, and that the righteous will be separated from the wicked by God on the Day of Judgment for ever, and what is more, the righteous will fully endorse this action of God and therefore they will agree that the wicked deserve to be assigned to hell. While the world continues the righteous seek the salvation of the lost and pray for them to come to repentance, but if they will not turn they agree with the judgment of God that sends unbelievers to destruction. Once the wicked realise that, they cannot forgive the righteous. But it takes an event like the rejection of Cain’s sacrifice and the acceptance of Abel’s before Cain can fully grasped what is at stake. When he caught a glimpse of that Cain was filled with murderous intent. ‘But the just seek his soul’, which means that they protect the soul of the upright or the blameless man, and they so value him that they want to build strong friendship with him, and to draw as close to him as they can. In a world full of duplicity and the ugliness of sin, a blameless person is a rare and precious treasure. This is what makes the world tolerable to the one who loves God: that there are still others in the world in whose hearts God has worked. Christian friendship does not focus on the body but on the real person, the innermost being, the conscious living soul to whom we relate. This is true fellowship, soul to soul. Our own soul is the most valuable part of us: we know that instinctively. But friendship needs to touch another human soul to be satisfied. The proverb therefore goes beyond merely preserving the life of the other, and make the opposite of a murderous hatred to be a deep love that unites at the level of the soul.
Application
Questions
‘But the just seek their soul.’ In spite of the frequent use of this phrase to indicate intent to take life, the subject of the second part of the proverb is ‘the just’. To translate, ‘As for the upright, they [the bloodthirsty] seek his soul’ ignores the singular possessive adjective attached to soul, ‘his soul’, while the word ‘upright’ is plural. Nor can ‘his’ refer to ‘the bloodthirsty’ as if the upright seek revenge, for ‘the bloodthirsty’ too are plural. It is more natural to relate ‘his soul’ to the singular object in the first half of the verse – ‘the blameless’ – and to make the sense positive.
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