5:10 lest strangers devour 1 your strength, 2
and your labor 3 benefit 4 another man’s house.
5:11 And at the end of your life 5 you will groan 6
when your flesh and your body are wasted away. 7
5:12 And you will say, “How I hated discipline!
My heart spurned reproof!
5:13 For 8 I did not obey my teachers 9
and I did not heed 10 my instructors. 11
1 tn Or “are sated, satisfied.”
2 tn The word כֹּחַ (coakh, “strength”) refers to what laborious toil would produce (so a metonymy of cause). Everything that this person worked for could become the property for others to enjoy.
3 tn “labor, painful toil.”
4 tn The term “benefit” does not appear in the Hebrew text, but is supplied in the translation for the sake of clarity and smoothness.
5 tn Heb “at your end.”
6 tn The form is the perfect tense with the vav consecutive; it is equal to a specific future within this context.
sn The verb means “to growl, groan.” It refers to a lion when it devours its prey, and to a sufferer in pain or remorse (e.g., Ezek 24:23).
7 tn Heb “in the finishing of your flesh and your body.” The construction uses the Qal infinitive construct of כָּלָה (calah) in a temporal clause; the verb means “be complete, at an end, finished, spent.”
8 tn The vav that introduces this clause functions in an explanatory sense.
9 tn The Hebrew term מוֹרַי (moray) is the nominal form based on the Hiphil plural participle with a suffix, from the root יָרָה (yarah). The verb is “to teach,” the common noun is “instruction, law [torah],” and this participle form is teacher (“my teachers”).
10 sn The idioms are vivid: This expression is “incline the ear”; earlier in the first line is “listen to the voice,” meaning “obey.” Such detailed description emphasizes the importance of the material.
11 tn The form is the Piel plural participle of לָמַד (lamad) used substantivally.