What Does Proverbs 20:20 Mean?
Whoever curses his father or his mother, his lamp goes out in the pupil of darkness.
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
Whoso curseth his father or his mother, his lamp shall be put out in obscure darkness.THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “curseth” also means “make light of”, and the verse answers that contempt with a lamp extinguished in darkness.
THE MEANING
When you make light of your father or mother, the verse pictures your own lamp going out inside darkness’s pupil. The harm it names does not stay aimed at the parent: contempt dims the life that carries it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that you can make your parents small without dimming your own light.
THE ROOT
מְקַלֵּל
meqallel
GROWS FROM
קָלַל
q-l-l
To be light or slight; to treat as having little weight or account, and by extension, to curse.
“curses” in this verse is meqallel. The English word “curseth” hides the root’s sense of making someone light or insignificant. The verse links that diminishment of a parent with the extinguishing of the speaker’s own lamp.
ALSO GROWS
qal: Light, slight, or of little weight.
קַל
This branch preserves the root’s concrete sense of lightness beneath “curseth.”
qelalah: A curse or malediction.
קְלָלָה
This noun names the curse that grows from the same root as treating someone as slight.
בְּאִישׁוֹן חֹשֶׁךְ
bə’ishon choshekh
GROWS FROM
חָשַׁךְ
ḥ-sh-kh
To grow dark or become dark.
“obscure darkness” in this verse is bə’ishon choshekh. The Hebrew phrase is “in the pupil of darkness.” אִישׁוֹן (’ishon) means “pupil,” the eye’s dark center; with חֹשֶׁךְ (choshekh), “darkness,” it places the extinguished lamp at darkness’s depth.
ALSO GROWS
ḥashakh: To grow dark or become dark.
חָשַׁךְ
The verb presents darkness as a state that overtakes light.
choshekh: Darkness or obscurity.
חֹשֶׁךְ
This noun appears in the verse’s image of the lamp disappearing into darkness.
THE PATTERN
Scripture binds the way parents are treated to the child’s own life and body.
The eye that mocks its father, and scorns to obey its mother, the ravens of the streambed dig it out, and the young eagles eat it.Give weight to your father and your mother, that your days may lengthen upon the ground which the LORD your God gives you.Give weight to your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise. That it may go well with you, and you may be long in days upon the earth.THE THREAD
Cursed be he who makes light of his father and his mother. And all the people shall say, Amen.“Setteth light by” comes from the same קָלַל (qalal) root as “curseth”: to make light of, slight, or treat as insignificant. This verse makes explicit the seed hidden in Proverbs’ wording: the curse begins by making one’s parents small.
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