Proverbs 19:7

19:7 All the relatives ¹  of a poor person hate him; ² 

how much more do his friends avoid him –

he pursues them ³  with words, but they do not respond. ⁴ 

Proverbs 30:33

30:33 For as the churning ⁵  of milk produces butter

and as punching the nose produces blood,

so stirring up anger ⁶  produces strife. ⁷ 

[19:7]  ¹ tn Heb “brothers,” but not limited only to male siblings in this context.

[19:7]  ² tn Heb “hate him.” The verb שָׂנֵא (sane’) may be nuanced “reject” here (metonymy of effect, cf. CEV). The kind of “dislike” or “hatred” family members show to a poor relative is to have nothing to do with him (NIV “is shunned”). If relatives do this, how much more will the poor person’s friends do so.

[19:7]  ³ tn The direct object “them” does not appear in the Hebrew but is supplied in the translation for the sake of smoothness.

[19:7]  ⁴ tn Heb “not they.” The last line of the verse is problematic. The preceding two lines are loosely synonymous in their parallelism, but the third adds something like: “he pursues [them with] words, but they [do] not [respond].” Some simply say it is a corrupt remnant of a separate proverb and beyond restoration. The basic idea does make sense, though. The idea of his family and friends rejecting the poor person reveals how superficial they are, and how they make themselves scarce. Since they are far off, he has to look for them “with words” (adverbial accusative), that is, “send word” for help. But they “are nowhere to be found” (so NIV). The LXX reads “will not be delivered” in place of “not they” – clearly an attempt to make sense out of the cryptic phrase, and, in the process, showing evidence for that text.

[30:33]  ⁵ tn This line provides the explanation for the instruction to keep silent in the previous verse. It uses two images to make the point, and in so doing repeats two words throughout. The first is the word מִיץ (mits), which is translated (in sequence) “churning,” “punching,” and “stirring up.” The form is a noun, and BDB 568 s.v. suggests translating it as “squeezing” in all three places, even in the last where it describes the pressure or the insistence on strife. This noun occurs only here. The second repeated word, the verb יוֹצִיא (yotsir), also occurs three times; it is the Hiphil imperfect, meaning “produces” (i.e., causes to go out).

[30:33]  ⁶ sn There is a subtle wordplay here with the word for anger: It is related to the word for nose in the preceding colon.

[30:33]  ⁷ sn The analogy indicates that continuously pressing certain things will yield results, some good, some bad. So pressing anger produces strife. The proverb advises people to strive for peace and harmony through humility and righteousness. To do that will require “letting up” on anger.