Proverbs 30:21 (BSB)

Under three things the earth trembles, under four it cannot bear up:

From Proverbs 30. Also in the ESV.

Commentary on Proverbs 30:21

• Matthew Henry (Presbyterian), Matthew Henry's Complete Commentary on Proverbs 30:18-23: Here is, I. An account of four things that are unsearchable, too wonderful to be fully known. And here, 1. The first three are natural things, and are only designed as comparisons for the illustration of the last. We cannot trace, (1.) An eagle in the air.
• John Gill (Reformed Baptist), Exposition of the Old and New Testaments on Proverbs 30:21: For three things the earth is disquieted,.... The inhabitants of it are made very uneasy; and for four which it cannot bear; they are a load and burden upon it, and are intolerable to those that dwell on it, and make them very uncomfortable.
• Jamieson-Fausset-Brown (Reformed), Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible on Proverbs 30:21: Pride and cruelty, the undue exaltation of those unfit to hold power, produce those vices which disquiet society (compare Pro 19:10; Pro 28:3).
• Keil & Delitzsch (Lutheran), Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament on Proverbs 30:21-23: Pro 30:21-23 It is now not at all necessary to rack one’s brains over the grounds or the reasons of the arrangement of the following proverb (vid., Hitzig). There are, up to this point, two numerical proverbs which begin with שׁתּים, Pro 30:7, and שׁתּי, Pro 30:15; after the cipher 2 there then, Pro 30:18, followed the cipher 3, which is now here continued: 21...