to treat as worthless: to weigh a person, idea, or thing and count it as of no value, looking down on it as beneath notice
This verb pictures contempt not as hot anger but as a cool dismissal. To despise something, in this sense, is to weigh it and find it worth nothing, to treat it as light and beneath one's notice. Its natural opposite in Hebrew is the idea of being heavy, that is, weighty with honor: honor gives a thing weight, while this kind of contempt makes it weightless.
It is above all a word of the wisdom writings. Almost every time it appears it is in Proverbs, where it maps out a whole moral world. Fools despise wisdom and correction, the senseless person despises a neighbor, and despising the poor is not merely foolish but counted as sin. Yet the same book insists that people do not despise a thief who steals because he is starving, and it warns a grown child never to despise an aged mother.
Its social logic stays the same across the books that use it: it is the disposition of the secure toward those who are slipping, of the comfortable toward the afflicted. When someone imagines buying love with wealth, the poet says such an offer would be utterly despised, because love cannot be priced. And when the prophet Zechariah asks who has despised the day of small things, he rebukes those who sneered at a modest new temple, dismissing it as insignificant.