a bruise or welt: the discolored mark a blow leaves on the skin, where blood pools underneath without the skin being broken open
At its core this word names one thing, and names it precisely: the discolored welt or bruise that shows up where a blow has landed but the skin is left unbroken. Ancient translators felt that precision and matched it exactly, from the Greek term for a welt (μώλωψ) down to the Latin word for a black-and-blue mark. It stands in deliberate contrast to an open, bleeding cut, the injury that breaks the skin; the two are paired as opposites in more than one passage.
The same plain meaning carries across very different settings:
- in the law it is one of three named injuries a person must pay compensation for
- in an old poem it measures how little provocation drove a man to kill
- in a prophet's vision it covers a whole nation pictured as a beaten body
- in a lament it stands for festering marks that give shape to the speaker's guilt
- in a proverb it is the bruising discipline that scours evil away
The most striking turn comes when this ordinary injury word is put to an extraordinary use. In the law a bruise measures the debt an attacker owes his victim; in the vision of the suffering servant, a single bruise borne by an innocent sufferer brings healing to the very people who should have owed him. The word that once weighed out what was owed becomes the word for a gift.