A man who is rich[1] and oppresses the poor
(is) a rain which sweeps away and gives no bread (xxviii. 3).
What kind of oppression is meant we may learn from Micah (ii. 3),—
And they covet lands and take them by violence;
houses, and take them away;
and they oppress the owner and his house,
a man and his inheritance.
It is in short the same unscrupulous accumulation of landed property to which Isaiah devotes one of his solemn 'woes' in his earliest prophecy, and which is one of the causes of the threatened captivity (Isa. v. 8-10 13). Exile has indeed become a familiar idea to those who admitted xxvii. 8 into the anthology, if, as most think, in the pathetic words of xxvii. 8 we may hear an echo of the march of Assyrian armies, 'to wander' being an euphemism for going into banishment.
As a bird that wanders from her nest,
so is a man that wanders[2] from his home (xxvii. 8).
As a rule, however, the proverbs relate to ordinary bourgeois life. Religious proverbs occur but rarely.[3] 'Folly' too is not so often mentioned as in the first collection, and the censure which it has to bear is mostly indirect and more or less satirical; see e.g. the proverb—
Though thou shouldest beat a fool in a mortar
in the midst of bruised corn with a pestle,
his folly would not depart from him (xxvii. 22),
and especially the paradoxical exhibition of the two sides of a truth—
Answer not the stupid man according to his folly,
lest thou thyself also become like unto him:
Answer the stupid man according to his folly,
lest he regard himself as wise (xxvi. 4, 5),
where the first distich dissuades from retaliating on a fool by a word or an action on his own low moral plane, while the.]
