Tag Archives: Proverbs 20:30

חַבֻּרֹ֣ות פֶּ֭צַע תמריק בְּרָ֑ע וּ֝מַכֹּ֗ות חַדְרֵי־בָֽטֶן׃ Proverbs 20:30 is not merely a proverb about discipline—it is a poetic microcosm of how Biblical Hebrew uses parallelism and object syntax to create emphasis. The verse reads literally: “Bruises of a wound cleanse in evil; and blows [cleanse] the inner chambers of the belly.” This puzzling phrasing contains a grammatical and poetic tension: a verb that seems to float without a second subject, and parallel objects that mirror each other. At the heart of this proverb lies a Hebrew verb with a peculiar object pattern: תמריק (you will cleanse / it will cleanse), and how Hebrew poetry frequently omits verbs in parallelism while preserving syntactic expectation.… Learn Hebrew