Righteousness tendeth to life - True godliness promotes health, and is the best means of lengthening out life; but wicked men live not out half their days.

As righteousness tendeth to life,.... Or, is unto life: not mere outward acts of moral righteousness; these may be done where there is no principle of spiritual life, and are no other than dead works, and will never bring to everlasting life; indeed the best righteousness of man's is no justification of life, nor can it entitle to it, nor is meritorious of it. Godliness, or true holiness, has the promise of this life and that to come, 1-Timothy 4:8; and so here in the Hebrew text it is, "unto lives" (x), in the plural number. Internal grace, or powerful godliness, which is the new man that is created in righteousness, gives a meetness for everlasting life, and issues in it; particularly the righteousness of Christ, as that is a perfectly justifying one; it makes a man alive in a law sense, and gives a title and claim to eternal life;
so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death; or, it is "to his own death"; it issues in that: not he that is overtaken in a fault, or falls into sin through the infirmity of the flesh and the force of temptation, but such who eagerly follow after it and overtake it; who give up themselves unto it, weary themselves in committing it, draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope; these often by their sins bring diseases upon them, which end in a corporeal death; or by means of which they come into the hand of the civil magistrate, and are capitally punished; and, however, die the second death, or an eternal one, the just wages of sin, Romans 6:23.
(x) "ad vitas", Montanus.

True holiness is true happiness. The more violent a man is in sinful pursuits, the more he hastens his own destruction.

Inference from Proverbs 11:18 (compare Proverbs 11:5-6; Proverbs 10:16).

19 Genuine righteousness reaches to life,
And he who pursues evil does it to his death.
The lxx translate υἱὸς δίκαιος, and the Syrian follows this unwarrantable quid pro quo; the Bible uses the phrase בן־עולה and the like, but not בן־צדקה. The Graec. Venet. (translating οὕτω) deprives the distich of its supposed independence. The Targ. renders כּן with the following ו as correlates, sic uti; but כן in comparative proverbs stands naturally in the second, and not in the first place (vid., p. 10). Without doubt כן is here a noun. It appears to have a personal sense, according to the parallel וּמרדּף, on which account Elster explains it: he who is firm, stedfast in righteousness, and Zckler: he who holds fast to righteousness; but כן cannot mean "holding fast," nor does מכונן; - "fast" does not at all agree with the meaning of the word, it means upright, and in the ethical sense genuine; thus Ewald better: "he who is of genuine righteousness," but "genuine in (of) righteousness" is a tautological connection of ideas. Therefore we must regard כן as a substantival neuter, but neither the rectum of Cocceius nor the firmum of Schultens furnishes a naturally expressed suitable thought. Or is כּן a substantive in the sense of 2 Kings 7:31? The word denotes the pedestal, the pillar, the standing-place; but what can the basis refer to here (Euchel)? Rather read "aim" (Oetinger) or "direction" (Lwenstein); but כן does not take its meaning from the Hiph. הכין. One might almost assume that the Chokma-language makes כּן, taliter, a substantive, and has begun to use it in the sense of qualitas (like the post-bibl. איכוּת), so that it is to be explained: the quality of righteousness tendeth to life. But must we lose ourselves in conjectures or in modifications of the text (Hitzig, כּנּס, as a banner), in order to gain a meaning from the word, which already has a meaning? We say דּבּר כּן, to speak right (Numbers 27:7), and עשׂות כּן, to do right (Ecclesiastes 8:10); in both cases כּן means standing = consisting, stedfast, right, recte. The contrast is לא־כן, 2-Kings 7:9, which is also once used as a substantive, Isaiah 16:6 : the unrighteousness of his words. So here כן is used as a substantive connected in the genitive, but not so that it denotes the right holding, retaining of righteousness, but its right quality - שׁל־צדקה אמתּה, as Rashi explains it, i.e., as we understand it: genuineness, or genuine showing of righteousness, which is not mere appearance without reality. That כּנים denotes such people as seek to appear not otherwise than what they truly are, is in favour of this interpretation. Such genuine righteousness as follows the impulse of the heart, and out of the fulness of the heart does good, has life as its result (Proverbs 19:23), an inwardly happy and externally a prosperous life; on the other hand, he who wilfully pursues evil, and finds in it satisfaction, brings death upon himself: he does it to his death, or if we make (which is also possible) רדּף the subject: it tends to his death. Thus in other words: Love is life; hatred destroys life.