Ver. 1. The words of King Lemuel.] Lemuel’s lesson, Bathsheba’s catechism. Lemuel she calls him, because God had owned him. “I will be his father, and be shall be my son”; (2 Samuel 7:14) and was “with him” so long as he was “with God,” according to 2 Chronicles 15:2. Indeed, when he grew discinct and dissolute, then God’s soul sat loose to him, and was disjointed from him, (Jeremiah 6:8) and the rather because he had had the benefit of better education. His father had taught him, and had taken much pains with him. (Proverbs 4:4) His mother also had counselled and cautioned him early not to give his strength to wine and women; and yet he was most inordinate in his love to these two. (Ecclesiastes 2) This was almost as great an aggravation of his sin, that he had been better taught and brought up, as that other, that he forsook the Lord that had “appeared unto him twice.” (1 Kings 11:9) The “words of King Lemuel” they are called, because, though composed by his mother, yet for his use, in the same sense as Psalms 127:1, is styled “A song of degrees of Solomon,” or “for Solomon,” though made by his father, who tells him there that which he found true by experience, “Lo, children are a heritage of the Lord,” &c., for by all his wives Solomon had none but one son, and him none of the wisest either. Aristippus dictus est μητροδιδακτος, quod eum mater Areta docuisset.
Ver. 2. What, my son? and what, the son of my womb?] An abrupt speech, importing abundance of affection; even more than might be uttered. There is an ocean of love in a parent’s heart, a fathomless depth of desire after the child’s welfare, in the mother especially. Some of the Hebrew doctors hold that this was Bathsheba’s speech to her son after his father’s death, when she partly perceived which way his genius leaned and led him: that she schooled him in this way, q.d., Is it even so, my son, my most dear son, &c. Oh do not give thy strength to women, &c.
Ver. 3. Give not thy strength to women.] Waste not unworthily the fat and marrow of thy dear and precious time, the strength of thy body, the vigour of thy spirits, in sinful pleasures and sensual delights. See Proverbs 5:9. Nor thy ways to that which destroyeth kings.] Venery is called by one death’s best harbinger. It was the destruction of Alexander the Great, of Otho the emperor (called for his good parts otherwise Miraculum mundi), of Pope Sextus the Fourth (qui decessit tabidus voluptate, saith the historian, died of a wicked waste), and of Pope Paul the Fourth, of whom it passed for a proverb, Eum per eandem partem animam profudisse per quam acceperat. The Lacedemonian commonwealth was by the hand of divine justice utterly overturned at Leuctra, for a rape committed by their messengers on the two daughters of Scedosus. And what befell the Benjamites on a like occasion is well known out of Judges 20:29-48, that I speak not of the slaughter of the Shechemites, (Genesis 34:25-29) &c.
Ver. 4. It is not for kings to drink wine,] i.e., To be “drunk with wine, wherein is excess,” (Ephesians 5:18) where the apostle determines excessive drinking to be downright drunkenness, viz., when as swine do their bellies, so men break their heads with filthy quaffing. This, as no man may lawfully do, so least of all princes; for in maxima libertate minima est licentia. Men are therefore the worse because they are bound to be better. Nor for princes strong drink.] Or, as some read it, Where is the strong drink? It is not for princes to ask such a question. All heady and intoxicating drinks are by statute here forbidden them. Of Bonosus the emperor it was said that he was born non ut vivat sed ut bibat, not to live but to drink; and when, being overcome by Probus, he afterwards hanged himself, it was commonly jested that a tankard hung there, and not a man. But what a beast was Marcus Antonius, that wrote (or rather spewed out) a book concerning his own strength to bear strong drink? And what another was Darius King of Persia, who commanded this inscription to be set upon his sepulchre, “I was able to hunt lustily, to drink wine soundly, and to bear it bravely.” That Irish rebel Tiroen, A.D. 1567, was such a drunkard, that, to cool his body when he was immoderately inflamed with wine and whisky, he would many times be buried in the earth up to the chin. These were unfit men to bear rule. Κυνηγειν εκρατουν, οινον πολυν πινειν, και τουτον φερειν καλως.— Strabo. Camden’s Elisabeth.
Ver. 5. Lest they drink and forget the law.] Drunkenness causeth forgetfulness (hence the ancients feigned Bacchus to be the son of forgetfulness), and stands in full opposition to reason and religion: when the wine is in, the wit is out. Seneca saith, that for a man to think to be drunk, and yet to retain his right reason, is to think to drink rank poison, and yet not to die by it. And pervert the judgment, &c.] Pronounce an unrighteous sentence: which when Philip king of Macedon once did, the poor woman whose cause it was, presently appealed from Philip now drunk, to Philip when he should be sober again. The Carthagenians made a law that no magistrate of theirs should drink wine. The Persians permitted their kings to be drunk one day in a year only. Solon made a law at Athens that drunkenness in a prince should be punished with death. See Ecclesiastes 10:16,17. Plutarch in Sympos.