Part of the four generations, Proverbs 30:11–14.
Quick answer
The first of four portraits. Contempt at home, stated in two directions: something said against the father, something withheld from the mother.
Read the whole unit
Four "there is a generation" sayings with no verdict attached to any of them, moving from the family outward to the treatment of the poor.
Read the whole unit
Four sayings, each opening with the same two words, דּוֹר and then a description: there is a generation that does this. There is no verb of judgment anywhere in the four. Nobody is condemned, nothing is threatened, no consequence is named. The unit simply says: this kind of person exists.
They are not four separate complaints. Read in order they move outward, and the movement is the argument. The first turns on the family, the second on the self, the third on the face, and the fourth on the poor. A person who curses his father, then a person who is clean in his own estimation, then a person whose eyes are lifted, then a person whose teeth are weapons pointed at people with nothing. The unit begins in a household and ends in an economy.
That order is the unit's teaching. It refuses to let contempt stay private. The generation that ends up eating the poor did not start there; it started by being unable to bless its mother and by being certain it was clean.
⚠ The unit's guard, which belongs on every member page: these are portraits of a type, not diagnostic tools for use on other people. Four descriptions in a row, none of them naming anyone, are an invitation to self-examination and nothing else. The book has already ruled on this: a verse about a bad kind of person may not be used to dismiss a person. Doing so commits the thing being described, since the third portrait is precisely someone whose eyes are lifted above other people.
What this verse contributes
The starting point, and the asymmetry inside it. The father gets an action and the mother gets an absence. Cursing is a thing you do; failing to bless is a thing you simply never get around to, and putting them in one sentence says both count. The second is the one people do not notice themselves doing.
Placing this first sets the unit's direction. Whatever the fourth portrait becomes, it began in the ordinary room where a person first learned that someone could be treated as beneath them.
What it does not mean
This is not a verse for someone who has had to put distance between themselves and a parent who harmed them. The portrait is of contempt, not of injury, and a person protecting themselves from abuse is not cursing anybody. Where this verse is used to force a wounded adult back into reach of the person who wounded them, it is being used against its own subject matter, since the unit's whole trajectory is the strong treating the weak as consumable.
Related: Proverbs 20:20 · Proverbs 30:17
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.