Proverbs 9:5

5. Come The sense is continued from the preceding verse. The sentiment, stripped of metaphor, is: Wise instructions, received with relish, will afford comfort, satisfaction, and pleasure of the highest and noblest kind. Comp. Isaiah 55:1, seq. “Not for the first time in John 6:0, or in the last supper, were bread and wine made the symbols of fellowship with eternal life and truth.” Speaker’s Com.

The wine I have mingled There is considerable diversity of opinion among commentators as to whether this mingling of wine was to make it stronger or weaker. In general, the Europeans English, Scotch, and Germans favour the idea of strengthening: and the Americans, of the later class especially, incline to the opinion of dilution: though Muenscher (American) says, The temperate nations of antiquity were not in the habit of drinking wine drugged, or even undiluted, except at feasts of drunkenness and debauchery, in which they sometimes indulged, when the wine was mixed with potent ingredients to increase its strength. Whether the greater or less progress of temperance principles has any thing to do with the exegesis in these two classes, we know not. The Hebrews were essentially a temperate people, and can hardly be supposed to have imposed less restraint on their appetites than did the Greeks and Romans. So also Dr. A. Clarke. Instead of “the wine I have mingled,” the Geneva has, “wine I have drawn.”

The Septuagint, Syriac, and Arabic add to this chapter the following: “But hasten away; delay not in the place; neither fix thine eye upon her: for thus thou shalt go through strange waters: and do thou return from strange waters, and drink not at a strange fountain, that thou mayest live long, and years of life be added to thee.” Very good advice, but not in the original Hebrew.