Proverbios 1:10

El Maestro pasa de Apelación a Advertencia: contra los malos compañeros. Cap. 1. Proverbios 1:10

10. sinners The warning points to a state of society of which indications are to be found not only in the unsettled times "when the Judges ruled" and before the monarchy was firmly established, when "vain" and "discontented" men banded together to lead the life of the outlaw and the freebooter (Jueces 11:3; 1 Samuel 22:2); but also in the better ordered periods of Jewish history when Psalmist and prophet inveigh against those who lurk privily in secret to murder the innocent (Salmo 10:8-10), and those whose feet are swift to shed blood (Isaías 59:7).

When our Lord was upon earth such robbing with violence and bloodshed was so familiar an incident in Palestine that He was able to make it the groundwork of a parable (Lucas 10:30). And it is so still. "Strange country! and it has always been so. There are a hundred allusions to just such things in the history, the psalms and the prophets of Israel.

A whole class of imagery is based upon them. Salmo 10:8-10; -He sitteth in the lurking-places of the villages" &c. And a thousand rascals, the living originals of this picture, are this day crouching and lying in wait all over the country to catch poor helpless travellers." (Thomson, The Land and the Book, p. 314.)

Two hundred years ago, when young men even of birth and education were to be found in the ranks of the highwaymen who overran the country (see, for example, Macaulay, Hist. of Eng. Vol. i. ch. iii.), the warning was no less apposite in England. In our own day, even in the special form which it here assumes, the warning, in view of the gangs of desperate men, poachers and burglars, to be found still both in towns and in the country, has not come to be superfluous, while in its wider aspect, "My son, if sinners entice thee consent thou not," it is of universal application.