Part of the four generations, Proverbs 30:11–14.
Quick answer
The third portrait, and the shortest. No action at all, just a face: eyes raised, lids lifted. The posture is the whole description.
Read the whole unit
Four portraits, no verdict attached to any, running from contempt at home to the devouring 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 hinge, and it is physical rather than moral. Nothing is done in this verse. Somebody is simply looking at other people from above, and the exclamation in the middle of the line is the observer reacting to it. The NKJV footnotes the second line in arrogance, which names what the posture communicates.
Its placement is the point. Verse 12 was a person's opinion of himself; verse 13 is that opinion becoming visible on his face; verse 14 is what that face eventually does to people who cannot stop it. The unit puts the look between the self-assessment and the violence because that is the order it happens in. This is also the shortest step to take and the easiest to excuse.
The book's list of what the LORD hates opens with the same image, רוּם עֵינַיִם, which the NKJV renders "a proud look" and footnotes literally as haughty eyes.
Related: Proverbs 6:16–19 · Proverbs 16:18 · Proverbs 21:4
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.