Verse 5
5. Conversation Your daily course and character in life.
Covetousness The enemy of hospitality, liberality, and peace.
Content Not excluding proper effort to better your condition, but securing tranquillity in the condition that results, and meeting all disadvantages with equanimity.
For he God.
Hath said Our happy equanimity is not based on a stoical reliance on self, but on a divine basis. The faithfulness of God underlies us. He and I, as Delitzsch tells us, are used in post-biblical Hebrew as mystical names of God.
Never leave… forsake thee In substance this promise repeatedly occurs in the Old Testament, but never in exact words. Thus one, a modification, occurs (Septuagint) in Joshua 1:5: “I will never forsake thee nor overlook thee.” Yet it is remarkable that the exact words given by our author are found in Philo, 1:430, 26. It is by all agreed that the coincidence is too peculiar to be accidental. Lunemann says, “Possibly, as Bleek and De Wette believe, the author has quoted it directly from Philo. But possibly, also, the expression, as here found and in Philo, may have been stereotyped into a proverb.” Delitzsch suggests that the passage had assumed this form in the liturgical service of the synagogue, and thence may have been used by both Philo and our author. We know no law that forbids an inspired author to quote an uninspired. Paul quoted the Greek poets, Jude quotes the book of Enoch, and our author may have quoted Philo.
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