“Give your eyes no sleep” expresses the urgency of getting free from this commitment. The language is figurative and means “Don’t waste a moment” or “Do so immediately.”

“And your eyelids no slumber” repeats the thought of the previous line in somewhat more poetic terms. Note how Good News Translation has retained the parallelism with “. . . go to sleep or even stop to rest.”

One example of restructuring verses 3-4 runs as follows: “If you have done this, you are in the power of this man. But there is a way for you to escape from your difficulty. Go immediately to see this man and beg him to set you free. Don’t sleep. Don’t delay. Go now.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. and Fry, Euan McG. A Handbook on Proverbs. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .