24 What the wicked fear, will overtake them, but the desire of the righteous will be granted.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
The fear - i. e., The thing feared (compare the marginal reference).
Shall be granted - Or, He (Yahweh) giveth the desire of the righteous.
The fear of the wicked - The wicked is full of fears and alarms; and all that he has dreaded and more than he has dreaded, shall come upon him. The righteous is always desiring more of the salvation of God, and God will exceed even his utmost desires.
The fear of the wicked, it shall come upon him,.... What he dreads in his own mind will be his unhappy case, sooner or later it comes upon him; his fear of distresses, calamities, and judgments in this life, and of eternal wrath and vengeance hereafter; for the most profligate and abandoned wretches, the greatest atheists, who endeavour to work themselves up to a disbelief of a God and a future state, have at times their frights and fears about these things; and as are their fears of God, so will his wrath be, Psalm 90:11. Jarchi illustrates this in the instance of the builders of Babel, who were afraid of being scattered upon the face of the earth, which thing feared came upon them through and for their building of the tower; and so it sometimes is, that the very thing which men fear comes upon them by the means which they take to prevent it; so the Jews were afraid that if their people believed in Jesus of Nazareth, the Romans would come and seize their city and nation, and therefore endeavoured to persuade them to reject him; for which rejection of him the thing they feared came upon them;
but the desire of the righteous shall be granted; or "he shall give" (s); that is, God shall give it; who has it in his hands or power to give it, as Jarchi's note is: what a righteous man desires from right principles, and with right views; what is for his own good and the glory of God; what he asks in faith, and with submission to the divine will, and is according to it, is sooner or later, in God's own time and way, granted unto him: particularly his desires after righteousness; after the righteousness of Christ, and to be found alone in that, living and dying; after holiness of heart and life, that he might be cleansed and kept from sin, and preserved to the coming of Christ; after more grace, an increase of it, and fresh supplies from Christ; after more communion with God and Christ, and conformity to them; after glory and happiness, and a being with them to all eternity. Some understand this of the righteous man's desire upon the wicked; that his fear might come upon him, and the glory of divine justice appear in his swift and sudden destruction; as expressed in Proverbs 10:25; so Aben Ezra.
(s) "dabit", Pagninus, Montanus, Baynus; "justis dat quod cupiunt", Tigurine version; "dabit Deus", Junius & Tremellius, Piscator, Michaelis; "dat Deus", Mercerus, Gejerus.
The largest desire of eternal blessings the righteous can form, will be granted.
it--the very thing. The wicked get dreaded evil; the righteous, desired good.
24 That of which the godless is afraid cometh upon him,
And what the righteous desires is granted to him.
The formation of the clause 24a is like the similar proverb, Proverbs 11:27; the subject-idea has there its expression in the genitival annexum, of which Genesis 9:6 furnishes the first example; in this passage before us it stands at the beginning, and is, as in Proverbs 10:22, emphatically repeated with היא. מגורה, properly the turning oneself away, hence shrinking back in terror; here, as Isaiah 66:4, of the object of fear, parallel to תּאוה, wishing, of the object of the wish. In 24b Ewald renders יתּן as adj. from יתן (whence איתן ecne), after the form פּקּח, and translates: yet to the righteous desire is always green. But whether יתּן is probably formed from יתן, and not from נתן, is a question in Proverbs 12:12, but not here, where wishing and giving (fulfilling) are naturally correlata. Hitzig corrects יתּן, and certainly the supplying of 'ה is as little appropriate here as at Proverbs 13:21. Also a "one gives" is scarcely intended (according to which the Targ., Syr., and Jerome translate passively), in which case the Jewish interpreters are wont to explain יתן, scil. הנותן; for if the poet thought of יתן fo with a personal subject, why did he not rescue it from the dimness of such vague generality? Thus, then, יתן is, with Bttcher, to be interpreted as impersonal, like Proverbs 13:10; Job 37:10, and perhaps also Genesis 38:28 (Ewald, 295a): what the righteous wish, that there is, i.e., it becomes actual, is fulfilled. In this we have not directly and exclusively to think of the destiny at which the godless are afraid (Hebrews 10:27), and toward which the desire of the righteous goes forth; but the clause has also truth which is realized in this world: just that which they greatly fear, e.g., sickness, bankruptcy, the loss of reputation, comes upon the godless; on the contrary that which the righteous wish realizes itself, because their wish, in its intention, and kind, and content, stands in harmony with the order of the moral world.
*More commentary available at chapter level.