What Does Proverbs 19:13 Mean?
A thick-headed son is the ruin of his father, and the strife of a wife is a dripping that does not stop.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping.THE KEY
Household distress can arrive as a single calamity or as a drip whose repeated disturbance wears down the home.
THE MEANING
The verse places a father’s calamity beside a wife’s contentions, comparing those disputes to a drip that keeps troubling the household. One strain lands as ruin; the other returns in small, persistent drops.
THE ROOT
טֹרֵד
tored
GROWS FROM
טרד
To trouble, disturb, or drive away.
The word translated “continual” comes from a root of disturbance and driving away. Paired with a drip, it pictures more than repetition: a recurring disturbance that keeps pressing on the home.
ALSO GROWS
tarad: To disturb or drive away.
טָרַד
This is the action beneath the verse’s description of an unrelenting drip.
tored: Troubling or persistent.
טֹרֵד
The form used here gives the drip its ongoing, disturbing force.
מִדְיְנֵי
midyenei
GROWS FROM
דין
To judge, plead, or contend.
“strife” in this verse is midyenei. The word for “contentions” belongs to the דין family of judging and pleading. English conveys the quarrel; the root also evokes a case that keeps being reopened, so the household remains caught in dispute.
ALSO GROWS
din: Judgment or a case to be decided.
דִּין
It shows the adjudicative sense carried by the root beneath the disputes.
madon: Strife or contention.
מָדוֹן
This related word makes the root’s link between dispute and judgment visible.
THE PATTERN
A small source of strain can shape what surrounds it when it keeps returning or goes unchecked.
A constant dripping on a rainy day, and a woman of strife, are level.Dead flies make the perfumer's oil stink; so a little folly outweighs wisdom and weight.Even so the tongue is a small limb, and it lifts its neck over great things. Look how great a forest a little fire kindles!THE THREAD
A constant dripping on a rainy day, and a woman of strife, are level.The same image of a persistent drip and contention appears again, making the comparison in Proverbs 19:13 explicit. The recurring disturbance is the point: conflict can wear at a home through its steady return.
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