Years ago, I wondered what this meant:
A sluggard says, “There’s a lion in the road, a fierce lion roaming the streets!”
Proverbs 26:13 (NIV Bible)
I think I get it now. I could leave it at that and ask my reader, what do you think it means, but I like to share what I think it means first, because it compels me to share.
I think this proverb means that a sluggard is someone who is afraid to do hard work. The sluggard won’t go outside, to go to work, because a lion is on the streets. Lions like work can be hard to tame and one might get killed if going outside when a lion is there. One may think that working hard will kill you. But I say, if you have no good reason not to work, you should.
Years ago I could not see what this proverb was actually saying–so I took it literally meaning that someone would not go outside if there really was a lion on the street. But that did not make sense somehow so I wondered what it really meant. Although I have never forgotten it. This proverb is a striking use of language that immediately gets the senses going…and when I revisited that proverb again, I finally got it.
