Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

Ecclesiastes 10:8

He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it It is scarcely a profitable task to endeavour to trace a very close connexion between this and the preceding verses. The writer has got into what we may call the gnomic, or proverb-making state of mind, and, as in the Book of Proverbs, his reflections come out with no very definite or logical sequence. All that we can say is that the context seems to indicate that the maxims which follow, like those which have gone before, indicate a wide experience in the life of courts, and that the experience of a courtier rather than of a king, and accordingly find their chief application in the region of man's political life, and that their general drift is that all great enterprises, especially perhaps all enterprises that involve change, destruction, revolution, have each of them its special danger. The first of the proverbs is verbally from Proverbs 26:27, and finds parallels in Psalms 7:15-16; Psalms 9:15; Psalms 10:2; Psalms 57:6. The thought is that of the Nemesis which comes on the evil doer. He digs a pit that his enemy may fall into it, and he falls into it himself. Plots and conspiracies are as often fatal to the conspirators as to the intended victims. The literature of all nations is full of like sayings, among which that of the engineer "hoist with his own petard" is perhaps the most familia

whoso breaketh a hedge, a serpent shall bite him Better, whoso breaketh down a fence or a stone wall, as in Proverbs 24:31; Lamentations 3:9, and elsewhere. Hedges, in the English sense of the word, are rare in the landscapes of Syria or Egypt. The crannies of such structures were the natural haunts of serpents (Isaiah 34:15; Amos 5:19), and the man who chose to do the work of destruction instead of being "a repairer of the breach" (Isaiah 58:12), might find his retribution in being bitten by them. The proverb, like many like sayings, is double-edged, and may have, as we consider the breaking down of the wall to be a good or evil work, a twofold meaning: (1) If you injure your neighbour's property, and act as an oppressor, there may come an instrument of retribution out of the circumstances of the act itself. (2) If you are too daring a reformer, removing the tottering wall of a decayed and corrupt institution, you may expect that the serpents in the crannies, those who have "vested interests" in the abuse, will bite the hand that disturbs them. You need beforehand to "count the cost" of the work of reformation.

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Ecclesiastes 10:8

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