16:18 Pride 4 goes 5 before destruction,
and a haughty spirit before a fall. 6
1 tn Heb “did not listen.”
2 tn Heb “went up.”
3 tn Heb “looked at each other [in the] face.”
4 sn The two lines of this proverb are synonymous parallelism, and so there are parasynonyms. “Pride” is paired with “haughty spirit” (“spirit” being a genitive of specification); and “destruction” is matched with “a tottering, falling.”
5 tn Heb “[is] before destruction.”
6 sn Many proverbs have been written in a similar way to warn against the inevitable disintegration and downfall of pride. W. McKane records an Arabic proverb: “The nose is in the heavens, the seat is in the mire” (Proverbs [OTL], 490).