buz

The lexica are unanimous on the core sense: BDB, HALOT, DCH, and NIDOTTE gloss the noun as contempt, scorn, treating as of no account, with כבד (to be weighty, honored) as its polar opposite. BDB's grid for the noun still organizes most commentary: contempt flowing from pride or wickedness (Job 31:34; Ps 31:19 Heb.; 123:3-4), contempt bred by prosperity and ease (Job 12:5), and contempt as the object one becomes (Gen 38:23; Ps 119:22; Prov 12:8; 18:3). A fourth, judicial use stands slightly apart, where God pours out (שׁפך) בּוּז on princes and nobles (Job 12:21; Ps 107:40) and the noun functions almost as a quasi-liquid substance of disgrace. Distribution is diagnostic: the noun congregates in Job, Psalms, and Proverbs, with Gen 38:23 the lone narrative outlier whose proverbial diction Alter, Westermann, and Waltke all note; the root is absent from the pre-exilic prophets, marking it as a sapiential register-word that bleeds into Persian-period poetry, and the feminine בּוּזָה surfaces once in Nehemiah's memoir (Neh 3:36 Heb. / 4:4 Eng.). Görg (TDOT) reads בוז as leaning stative-attitudinal against the more transitive-relational בָּזָה, Wagner (TLOT) subsumes it as a poetic-sapiential variant, and a minority current (Bohas, Hoberman) treats both as surface expansions of a biradical kernel bz; comparative Semitic support is thinner than older handbooks claimed, since the frequently cited Akkadian bâšu belongs with בושׁ and the supposed D-stem buzzuʾu is essentially absent from CAD and AHw. On the sociology of the noun, Clines, Habel, and Hartley read Job 12:5 as Job's exposure of the friends' theology as the ideology of the comfortable, and Clines stresses that at Job 12:21 בּוּז is the substance of disgrace rather than an emotion; Allen and Hossfeld-Zenger read Ps 119:22 as the condition of being despised by the powerful, a weight to be rolled away; the שַׁאֲנָן shared by Job 12:5 and Ps 123:4 ties those two texts together. The LXX renders this family with ἐξουθενέω / ἐξουδενόω, καταφρονέω, and (in Proverbs) μυκτηρίζω, with Gen 38:23 handled freely by καταγελασθῶμεν. The homophonous tribal name Buz, borne by Elihu the Buzite and Ezekiel's father, is almost universally judged unrelated and North-Arabian in origin.