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Proverbs 30:10–14, King James Version
Italic words were supplied in the English translation for clarity.
Proverbs 30:10–14
Humility, teachability, pride, and reputation — Accuse not a servant unto his master, lest he curse thee,…
Do not slander a servant to the master, then a generation is profiled in four marks
Do not accuse a servant to his master, lest he curse you, and you be found guilty. There is a generation that curses their father, and does not bless their mother. There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet are not washed from their filthiness. There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their eyelids are lifted up. There is a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among people.
Accusing a servant to a master is using a power gradient to wreck a person who cannot answer as an equal. Curse and guilt mean the slander can rebound as a true charge against you. It is not a ban on reporting real harm. Generation here is a type of people, not a date-stamp on the young.
Contempt of parents, fake purity, lifted eyelids, and mouths that eat the poor belong together
Cursing father and refusing to bless mother is contempt of origin, not adult refusal of abusive orders. Pure in their own eyes yet unwashed is self-awarded innocence. Lofty eyes are trained disdain. Sword-teeth are economic violence: the poor are food. Filthiness is moral stain, not a body shame and not a purity culture of women's flesh.
The servant warning and the devouring generation frame the same injustice: speech and appetite used against people with less cover.
How this should shape us
Do not use a boss, a court, or a platform to destroy someone who cannot answer you as a peer. Refuse the type that scorns parents, baptizes itself clean, looks down, and eats the poor. If you have any of those marks, they are not a personality; they are a generation to leave.
Teach it back
Explain Proverbs 30:10–14 in your own words. Identify its form and collection, trace one line from role through contextual meaning and enduring truth to application, name one uncertainty, and reject one misuse explicitly.
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Go deeper
The explanation above is meant to stand on its own. Open these notes only if you want language, history, disagreements, or source locations.
Where careful interpreters disagreeThe strongest options and their difficulties
Where do careful readers disagree?
Best judgment: The unit's speaker, literary form, imagery, or arrangement carries named uncertainty. The judgment follows the received sequence without inventing a biography or forcing every image into one allegory.
How certain? probableResearch trail and exact locationsThe source record behind this section
Supports: Exact displayed KJV words, canonical order, paragraph flags, supplied-word markup, and complete unit coverage.
Proverbs 30:10–14, repository-pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM-derived corpus
Supports: Masoretic Hebrew wording and morphology used only for the exact unit's lexical, grammatical, parallel, superscription, number-saying, and acrostic questions.
Open Scriptures MorphHB v2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Prov.xml, OSIS 30:10-30:14
Supports: Verse-attached textual, lexical, grammatical, syntactic, parallelism, and older-English controls for the exact range.
NET Bible Proverbs PDF, printed pp. 1178-1181, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 30:10–14
Supports: Whole-book and collection orientation, local commentary, social-setting proposals, and named interpretation limits.
Aitken, ‘Proverbs,’ Oxford Bible Commentary, printed pp. 405-422, subsection covering 30:10–14 and the Words of Agur and numbered observations outline
Supports: One historical-social account of poverty, wealth, interest, oppression, labor, and differing evaluations within the collection.
Wittenberg, ‘Situational context of statements concerning poverty and wealth,’ Scriptura 21, pp. 1-23, especially the sayings and redactional comparison relevant to Proverbs 30:10–14
Sources for This Section
These records identify the source, the claim it supports, and the exact location used. A source remains evidence to evaluate; it does not replace the biblical text.
Biblical text
King James (Authorized) Version — eng-kjv2006
eBible.org and CrossWire Bible Society
USFM archive eng-kjv2006_usfm.zip; source files dated 2026-08-19; downloaded 2026-08-24; archive SHA-256 aec1b3b26c622fd3d963d2bbac963016b9513246ffbfa20da00bb100372ea007; normalized corpus SHA-256 09aef51d90488aa7b9722b3fd9a93f4b25f6bf2064c5fd798fb39673c300ddf2.
Supports: Exact displayed KJV words, canonical order, paragraph flags, supplied-word markup, and complete unit coverage.
Exact location: Proverbs 30:10–14, repository-pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM-derived corpus
Open source ↗hebrew text and morphology
Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible: Proverbs
Open Scriptures
Open Scriptures, release 2.2
Supports: Masoretic Hebrew wording and morphology used only for the exact unit's lexical, grammatical, parallel, superscription, number-saying, and acrostic questions.
Exact location: Open Scriptures MorphHB v2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Prov.xml, OSIS 30:10-30:14
Open source ↗translation and translator notes
NET Bible: Proverbs with translators' notes
Biblical Studies Press
Biblical Studies Press, 2006
Supports: Verse-attached textual, lexical, grammatical, syntactic, parallelism, and older-English controls for the exact range.
Exact location: NET Bible Proverbs PDF, printed pp. 1178-1181, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 30:10–14
Open source ↗modern critical commentary
Proverbs
K. T. Aitken
Oxford University Press, in The Oxford Bible Commentary, 2001
Supports: Whole-book and collection orientation, local commentary, social-setting proposals, and named interpretation limits.
Exact location: Aitken, ‘Proverbs,’ Oxford Bible Commentary, printed pp. 405-422, subsection covering 30:10–14 and the Words of Agur and numbered observations outline
Open source ↗peer reviewed open access journal article
The situational context of statements concerning poverty and wealth in the Book of Proverbs
G. H. Wittenberg
Scriptura 21, 1987; open archive 2020
Supports: One historical-social account of poverty, wealth, interest, oppression, labor, and differing evaluations within the collection.
Exact location: Wittenberg, ‘Situational context of statements concerning poverty and wealth,’ Scriptura 21, pp. 1-23, especially the sayings and redactional comparison relevant to Proverbs 30:10–14
Open source ↗