Proverbs 15:17 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Better is a dinner of herbs— They eat very little meat in the east in comparison with what we do: bread, dibbs, leban, butter, rice, and a very little mutton, make the chief of their food in the winter, says Dr. Russel, speaking of the common people of Aleppo; as rice, bread, cheese, and fruit, do in the summer. Dr. Shaw gives a like account of the abstemiousness of the Arabs. This sparingness is occasioned, not by animal food being disagreeable to them, but by the straitness of their circumstances. The Arabs abound in cattle; but, being forced to draw all the other conveniencies of life from the profit they make of them, they kill very few for their own use. The Israelites were in much the same situation; great strangers to trade and manufactures; their patrimony but small, as they were so numerous; and therefore Solomon might with great propriety describe a ruinously expensive way of living by their frequent eating of flesh, chap. Proverbs 23:20 which in our country would be expressed in a very different manner. A dinner, however, on herbs alone is not what the ordinary people of Aleppo are obliged to content themselves with, sparing as their way of living is; a thought which may serve to illustrate the present passage, where the contrast between the repasts of the rich and the poor is designed to be strongly marked. See Observations, p. 181 and the ingenious Mr. Seed's Sermon on this text, vol. 1: serm. 3. Stalled oxen, or oxen fatted in a stall, were looked upon as the highest entertainment. It is not unworthy of remark, that Homer never sets any other repast than this before his heroes.