Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death,
Is the man who deceives his neighbor,And says, “I was only joking!”
Proverbs 26:18–19 · NKJVPart of The Man Who Says He Was Joking, Proverbs 26:18–19.
Quick answer
It is the man who did real damage to someone he knows and then claimed it was a joke. The comparison is to a lunatic with live weapons, and the saying is not exaggerating for effect.
Read the whole unit
Read the whole unit
These two verses are one sentence. The Hebrew runs "like a madman…" and then "so is the man…", a כְּ…כֵּן comparison, and the same construction appears four other times in this chapter, at verses 1, 2, 8 and 11, each time complete inside a single verse. Here alone it spans two, which is why verse 18 read by itself is a fragment.
The comparison is severe and deliberately so. Firebrands and arrows are not mischief; the third item in the list is simply death. And the man throwing them is מִתְלַהְלֵהַּ, a word for someone deranged, which supplies the defense the deceiver will offer: he did not mean anything by it. The saying's answer is that a madman does not mean anything by it either, and people are still on fire.
What is being described is the retreat rather than the deception. The damage is done, it is seen, and instead of owning it the man reclassifies it as humor, which asks the injured party to accept both the injury and the account of it. The book is unusually blunt here: the excuse is treated as the more revealing act. He knows what he did, or he would not need a story.
What this verse contributes
the identification, and the quoted excuse. "I was only joking" is the verse's real subject.
The other half
This verse is the first half of one sentence and has no predicate of its own. It sets up an image of a man hurling lit torches and live arrows at random, and verse 19 says who that is.
Related: Proverbs 26:28 · Proverbs 12:18 · Proverbs 10:18 · Proverbs 25:18
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.