9:5
Notice the parallel parts:
5a Come, eat my bread
5b and drink the wine I have mixed.
The parallel parts are not similar in meaning, but they describe activities at a feast that normally go together as a pair.
9:5a–b
Come, eat my bread and drink the wine I have mixed: These figures of speech are part of the extended metaphor that began in 9:1. In this metaphor, eating Wisdom’s food and drinking her wine represent listening to and heeding her teaching or advice. If this is not clear to your readers, you may want to add a footnote here like the following:
In this verse and in 9:2, Wisdom’s teaching/advice is compared to delicious food and drink, because it is good and useful. When a person listens to wise advice and follows it, it is as if he is eating Wisdom’s food and drinking her wine.
eat my bread: The word translated as my bread is used to describe any kind of solid food. In some languages, a literal translation of my bread would refer to the food that Wisdom intended to eat. Another way to translate this phrase is:
the food that I have prepared
In Hebrew, the clause eat my bread actually means “eat some of my food.” In languages that have different ways to say “eat some of” and “eat all of,” the first choice would be appropriate. In other languages, it may be more natural to say simply “Come and eat” and leave “my food” implied.
General Comment on 9:4a–5b
If you used a phrase similar to “Come to my house” in 9:4, it may be redundant in some languages to repeat “Come” in 9:5. If that is the case, it may be better to leave one of these commands implicit. For example:
4a “This is what Wisdom says: You immature people 4b with no sense, 5a come so that you may eat 5b and drink the delicious wine that I have prepared.
See also 9:4a–5b (combined/reordered) in the Display for ways to combine and/or reorder the parallel lines.
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