Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye.
Keep my commandments, and live - and so thou shalt live (Proverbs 4:4).
And my law as the apple of thine eye - literally, 'the blackness of the eye' х 'iyshown (H380), from 'aashan, to be black: others take it as the diminutive of 'iysh (H376), a man; a little man being seen in the retina; as koree in Greek means both a virgin and the pupil of an eye]. As God would have us to keep His law as the apple of our eye, so He keeps His people (Deuteronomy 32:10), in answer to their prayer (Psalms 17:8), as the apple of His eye (Zechariah 2:8). We guard the eye as our most precious and tender member from hurt, and prize it most dearly (cf. Galatians 4:15). The pupil is the most precious part of the eye, and carefully guarded by the eyebrows, eyelids, and eyelashes. As we guard the pupil of the eye from the least mote, which is sufficient to hurt it, so God's law is so tender and holy a thing that the least violation of it in thought, word, or deed, is sin; and we are so to keep the law as to avoid any violation of it. The law resembles the pupil of the eye also in its being spiritually the organ of light, without which we should be in utter darkness.