¹ tn Or “distress” or “grief.”

¹ tn NEB suggests “grief”; NJPS, “vexation.”

³ tn Heb “grief and groaning will flee.”

¹ sn As a sign of grief and mourning.

¹ sn The Hebrew noun means “vexation, anger, grief.”

¹ sn As a sign of grief and mourning.

³ tn Or “not from regret”; Grk “not out of grief.”

² tn Heb “[with] grief in my heart by day.”

³ tn This is the same Greek word (πένθος, penthos) translated “grief” in vv. 7-8.

² sn Mourners wore sackcloth (funeral clothes) as an outward expression of grief.

¹ sn This physical action was part of an expression of grief. Cf. Jer 31:19.

¹ tn Heb “Although he has caused grief.” The word “us” is added in the translation.

⁴ tn Heb “grief and groaning will flee”; KJV “sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

⁴ sn Shaving the head and beard were outward signs of mourning and grief.

¹ tn Heb “arose, stood”; which here suggests that they stood by him in his time of grief.

³ sn The proverb is almost the same as 10:1, except that “despises” replaces “grief.” This adds the idea of the callousness of the one who inflicts grief on his mother (D. Kidner, Proverbs [TOTC], 116).

⁵ tn Heb “grief of his mother.” The noun “grief” is in construct, and “mother” is an objective genitive. The saying declares that the consequences of wisdom or folly affects the parents.

¹ tn Given the context, this could be understood as a shock, e.g., idiomatically “Good grief! I saw….”

² tc Heb “and its end, joy, is grief.” The suffix may be regarded as an Aramaism, a proleptic suffix referring to “joy.” Or it may be considered a case of wrong word division, moving the ה (he) to read אַחֲרִית הַשִּׂמְחָה (ʾakharit hassimkhah, “after the joy [may be] grief”) rather than אַחֲרִיתָהּ שִׂמְחָה (ʾakharitah simkhah, “after it, joy, grief”).

³ tn Grk “comfort him, lest somehow such a person be swallowed up by excessive grief,” an idiom for a person being so overcome with grief as to despair or give up completely (L&N 25.285). In this context of excessive grief or regret for past sins, “overwhelmed” is a good translation since contemporary English idiom speaks of someone “overwhelmed by grief.” Because of the length of the Greek sentence and the difficulty of expressing a negative purpose/result clause in English, a new sentence was started here in the translation.