13 Don't love sleep, lest you come to poverty. Open your eyes, and you shall be satisfied with bread.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
Open thine eyes - Be vigilant and active. That is the secret of prosperity.
Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty - Sleep, indescribable in its nature, is an indescribable blessing; but how often is it turned into a curse! It is like food; a certain measure of it restores and invigorates exhausted nature; more than that oppresses and destroys life. A lover of sleep is a paltry, insignificant character.
Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty,.... Sleep is a very great natural blessing; it is a gift of God, what nature requires, and is desirable; it is to be loved, though not immoderately; it is sweet to a man, and what he should be thankful for; yet should not indulge himself in to the neglect of the proper business of life; nor to be used but at the proper time for it; for the eye is made for sight, and not for sleep only, as Aben Ezra observes, connecting the words with the preceding; and therefore should not be kept shut and inattentive to business, which must necessarily end in poverty and want; see Proverbs 6:9; and so spiritual sleep and slothfulness bring on a spiritual poverty in the souls of men, both as to the exercise of grace and the performance of duty;
open thine eyes, and thou shall be satisfied with bread; that is, open thine eyes from sleep, awake and keep so, and be sedulous and industrious in the business of thy calling; so shalt thou have a sufficiency of food for thyself and family; see Proverbs 12:11. It may be applied to awaking out of sleep in a spiritual sense, and to a diligent attendance to duty and the use of means, whereby the souls of men come to be satisfied with the goodness of the Lord, and the fatness of his house; see Ephesians 5:14.
Those that indulge themselves, may expect to want necessaries, which should have been gotten by honest labour.
Activity and diligence contrasted with sloth (Proverbs 6:9; Proverbs 10:11).
lest . . . poverty--literally, "be deprived of inheritance."
13 Love not sleep, lest thou become poor;
Open thine eyes, and have enough to eat.
What is comprehended in the first line here is presented in detail in Proverbs 6:9-11. The fut. Niph. of רוּשׁ, to become poor (cf. Proverbs 10:4), is formed metaplastically from ירשׁ, Proverbs 23:21; Proverbs 30:9, as at 1-Samuel 2:7; Hitzig compares (Arab.) ryth, which, however, means to loiter or delay, not to come back or down. The R. רש signifies either to be slack without support (cf. דּל), or to desire (cf. אבון, Arab. fkyr, properly hiscens, R. פק, as in פקח, to open widely, which here follows). Regarding the second imper. 13b, vid., Proverbs 3:4 : it has the force of a consequence, Las deine augen wacker sein, So wirstu brots gnug haben (Luth.) [Let thine eyes be open, so shalt thou have bread enough]. With these two proverbs of the eyes, the group beginning with Proverbs 20:8 rounds itself off.
Open - Shake off sloth and betake thyself to thy employment with diligence and vigour.
*More commentary available at chapter level.