From the early Church Fathers to now.
1 Patristic · 1 Jewish · 1 Reformed · 1 Lutheran
“Who passeth through the street by the corner, and goeth nigh the way of her house.”
“And walks towards her house. He who has turned from the way of truth, rightly appropriates the way to the house of the harlot or heretic; which is fittingly placed, as we have explained, both in the street and near the corner.”
“next to her corner The corner of the harlot and of the pagan house of worship.”
“her corner--where she was usually found. went . . . house--implying, perhaps, confidence in himself by his manner, as denoted in the word went--literally, "tread pompously."”
“Now follows, whither he saw the young fop [Laffen] then go in the darkness. 8 Going up and down the street near her corner, And he walked along the way to her house, 9 In the twilight, when the day declined, In the midst of the night and deep darkness. We may interpret עבר as appos.: juvenem amentem, ambulantem, or as the predicate accus.: vidi juvenem ... ambulantem; for that one may so express himself in Hebrew (cf. e.g., Isa 6:1; Dan 8:7), Hitzig unwarrantably denies. The passing over of the part. into the finite, 8b, is like Pro 2:14, Pro 2:17, and that of the inf. Pro 1:27; Pro 2:8. שׁוּק, Arab. suk (dimin. suweiḳa, to separate, from sikkat, street, alley), still means, as in former times, a broad street, a principal street, as well as an open place, a market-place where business is transacted, or according to its etymon: where cattle are driven for sale. On the street he went backwards and forwards, yet so that he kept near to her corner (i.e., of the woman whom he waited for), i.e., he never withdrew himself far from the corner of her house, and always again returned to it. The corner is named, because from that place he could always cast a look over the front of the house to see whether she whom he waited for showed herself. Regarding פּנּהּ for פּנּתהּ, vid., at Psa 27:5 : a primary form פּן has never been in use; פּנּים, Zac 14:10, is plur. of פּנּהּ. אצל (from אצל, Arab. wasl, to bind) is, as a substantive, the side (as the place where one thing connects itself with another), and thus as a preposition it means (like juxta from jungere) beside, Ital. allato. דּרכו is the object. accus., for thus are construed verbs eundi (e.g., Hab 3:12, Num. 30:17, cf. Pro 21:22). Pro 7:9 The designations of time give the impression of progress to a climax; for Hitzig unwarrantably denies that נשׁף means the twilight; the Talmud, Berachoth 3b, correctly distinguishes תרי נשׁפי two twilights, the evening and the morning twilight. But the idea is not limited to this narrow sense, and does not need this, since the root-word נשׁף (vid., at Isa 40:24) permits the extension of the idea to the whole of the cool half (evening and night) of the entire day; cf. the parallel of the adulterer who veils himself by the darkness of the night and by a mask on his countenance, Job 24:15 with Jer 13:16. However, the first group of synonyms, בּנשׁף בּערב יום (with the Cod. Frankf. 1294, to be thus punctuated), as against the second, appears to denote an earlier period of the second half of the day; for if one reads, with Hitzig, בּערב יום (after Jdg 19:9), the meaning remains the same as with בּערב יום, viz., advesperascente die (Jerome), for ערב = Arab. gharab, means to go away, and particularly to go under, of the sun, and thus to become evening. He saw the youth in the twilight, as the day had declined (κέκλικεν, Luk 24:29), going backwards and forwards; and when the darkness of night had reached its middle, or its highest point, he was still in his lurking-place. אישׁון לילה, apple of the eye of the night, is, like the Pers. dili scheb, heart of the night, the poetic designation of the middle of the night. Gusset incorrectly: crepusculum in quo sicut in oculi pupilla est nigredo sublustris et quasi mistura lucis ac tenebrarum. אישׁון is, as elsewhere לב, particularly the middle; the application to the night was specially suitable, since the apple of the eye is the black part in the white of the eye (Hitzig). It is to be translated according to the accus., in pupilla noctis et caligine (not caliginis); and this was probably the meaning of the poet, for a ב is obviously to be supplied to ואפלה.”
The in-app commentary runs from the Fathers to the early-modern record, then stops — that's where the public-domain sources end, not where the reading does. For the modern reading, follow the sources directly.