Proverbs 12:12

net This rendering, which is retained in R.V. text, and on which the rendering prey, R.V. marg., is only a gloss (prey=net, for what it catches), gives a good and forcible antithesis to the proverb. There is perhaps an intended contrast between the restless and often fruitless activity of the hunter with his net, and the calm, stedfast fruit-bearing, as by a natural process, of the firmly-rooted tree. So St Paul contrasts the "works" of the flesh with the "fruit" of the spirit, and "the unfruitful works of darkness" with "the fruit of the light" (Galatians 5:19; Galatians 5:22; Ephesians 5:9-10, R.V.).

The abrupt change of figure from the "net" to the tree is quite in accordance with Hebrew modes of thought. In like manner in Psalms 1 the righteous is the flourishing and fruitful tree, and the wicked, not as we might have expected the barren and withered tree, but the chaff scattered by the wind as it sweeps across the bare hill-top of the summer threshing-floor.

The rendering fortress(A.V. marg., the munimentumof the Vulgate) is explained to mean, that the protection which a wicked man seeks by associating with men like himself, and so finding security in numbers, the righteous has in his own innate stability. But this is far-fetched, and the rendering disappears altogether in R.V.