27:16 If he piles up silver like dust
and stores up clothing like mounds of clay,
27:17 what he stores up 1 a righteous man will wear,
and an innocent man will inherit his silver.
27:18 The house he builds is as fragile as a moth’s cocoon, 2
like a hut 3 that a watchman has made.
1 tn The text simply repeats the verb from the last clause. It could be treated as a separate short clause: “He may store it up, but the righteous will wear it. But it also could be understood as the object of the following verb, “[what] he stores up the righteous will wear.” The LXX simply has, “All these things shall the righteous gain.”
2 tn Heb כָעָשׁ (kha’ash, “like a moth”), but this leaves room for clarification. Some commentators wanted to change it to “bird’s nest” or just “nest” (cf. NRSV) to make the parallelism; see Job 4:14. But the word is not found. The LXX has a double expression, “as moths, as a spider.” So several take it as the spider’s web, which is certainly unsubstantial (cf. NAB, NASB, NLT; see Job 8:14).
3 tn The Hebrew word is the word for “booth,” as in the Feast of Booths. The word describes something that is flimsy; it is not substantial at all.