He that hasteth to be rich,.... As every man that is eagerly desirous of riches is; he would be rich at once z, and cannot wait with any patience in the ordinary course of means:
[hath] an evil eye; on the substance of others, to get it, right or wrong; is an evil man, and takes evil methods to be rich a; see 1 Timothy 6:9; or an envious one; is an envious man; as the Septuagint and Arabic versions; he envies others, as the Vulgate Latin version, the riches of other men; he grudges everything that goes beside himself; and that makes him in haste to be rich, that he may be equal to or superior to others: or he is a sordid, avaricious, illiberal man, that will not part with anything for the relief, for others, and is greedy of everything to amass wealth to himself; an evil eye is opposed to a good or bountiful one, that is, to a man that is liberal and generous, Proverbs 22:9;
and considereth not that poverty shall come upon him; for wealth gotten hastily, and especially wrongfully, diminishes, wastes, and comes to nothing in the end; it sometimes flies away as fast as it comes; it has wings to do the one, as well as the other: this the man in haste to be rich does not consider, or he would have taken another method; since this is not the true way of getting and keeping riches, but of losing them, and coming to want; see Proverbs 13:11.
z "Nam dives qui fieri vult, et cito vult fieri", Juvenal. Satyr. 14. v. 176. a "Sed quae reverentia legum? quis metus, ant pudor est unquam properantis avari?" Juvenal, ib.