The Pulpit Commentary on Proverbs 29:18

The Pulpit Commentary · Joseph S. Exell and contributors · Public domain

Where there is no vision, the people perish; rather, cast off restraint, become ungovernable, cannot be reined in (Exodus 32:22, Exodus 32:25). "Vision" (chazon), prophecy in its widest sense, denotes the revelation of God's will made through agents, which directed the course of events, and was intended to be coordinate with the supreme secular authority.

The prophets were the instructors of the people in Divine things, standing witnesses of the truth and power of religion, teaching a higher than mere human morality. The fatal effect of the absence of such revelation of God's will is stated to be confusion, disorder, and rebellion; the people, uncontrolled, fall into grievous excesses, which nothing hut high principles can restrain.

We note the licence of Eli's time, when there was no open vision (1 Samuel 3:1-21.); in Asa's days, when Israel had long been without a teaching priest (2 Chronicles 15:3); and when the impious Ahaz "made Judah naked" (2 Chronicles 28:19); or when the people were destroyed by reason of lack of knowledge of Divine things (Hosea 4:6).

Thus the importance of prophecy in regulating the life and religion of the people is fully acknowledged by the writer, in whose time, doubtless, the prophetical office was in full exercise: but this seems to be the only passage in the book where such teaching is directly mentioned; the instructors and preceptors elsewhere introduced as disseminating the principles of the chochmah being parents, or tutors, or professors, not inspired prophets.

But he that keepeth the Law, happy is he! "The Law" (torah) is not merely the written Mosaic Law, but the announcement of God's will by the mouth of his representatives; and the thought is, not the blessedness of those who in a time of anarchy and irreligion keep to the authorized enactments of the Sinaitic legislation, but a contrast between the lawlessness and ruin of a people uninfluenced by religious guidance, and the happy state of those who obey alike the voice of God, whether conveyed in written statutes or by the teaching of living prophets.

(For "happy is he," comp. Proverbs 14:21; Proverbs 16:20.) Septuagint, "There shall be no interpreter ( ἐξηγητὴς) to a sinful nation, but he that keepeth the Law is most blessed."

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