SWEAT IN PROVERBS 10:9

He that walketh uprightly walketh surely:
but he that perverteth his ways shall be known.
Proverbs 10:9

Proverb 10:9 is botched beyond recognition by the ever ridiculous Dahood. The ever imaginative Ugaritic “scholar” Dahood provides the nonsensical and noneloquent “He who walks uprightly walks securely, But he who makes his ways devious will sweat it out.”1

This is a verse that one should expect to see perverted by Dahood who perverteth his ways indeed. Either the meaning went over his head, or he disliked its sentiment so much that he felt he had to alter it. The excuse that he gives for changing the common and unchallenging verb yd’ from “to be known” into “to sweat” is the incredibly farfetched proposition that this is a dialectical form of a verb that may mean “to sweat” in Ugaritic and which means “to flow” in Arabic.

What makes this convoluted argument even worse is the fact that neither verb even phonologically matches the Hebrew verb. So not only is this rendition dependent upon the hypothetical existence of a dialectical variation on a Hebrew word associated with sweating, but it is based on unrelated roots that do not even look like clear cut cognates at all, and he does so in order to produce a translation that is complete gibberish!

The verse made sense before Dahood got a hold of it, but he did prove that what the KJV says about perverters is true; they shall be known.

1 Dahood, Proverbs, p. 18.

John Hinton, Ph.D.
Bible Restoration Ministry
A ministry seeking the translating and reprinting of KJV equivalent
Bibles in all the languages of the world.