5:16 Should your springs be dispersed 1 outside,
your streams of water in the wide plazas?
21:1 The king’s heart 2 is in the hand 3 of the Lord like channels of water; 4
he turns it wherever he wants.
1 tn The verb means “to be scattered; to be dispersed”; here the imperfect takes a deliberative nuance in a rhetorical question.
2 sn “Heart” is a metonymy of subject; it signifies the ability to make decisions, if not the decisions themselves.
3 sn “Hand” in this passage is a personification; the word is frequently used idiomatically for “power,” and that is the sense intended here.
4 tn “Channels of water” (פַּלְגֵי, palge) is an adverbial accusative, functioning as a figure of comparison – “like channels of water.” Cf. NAB “Like a stream”; NIV “watercourse”; NRSV, NLT “a stream of water.”