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This is the word behind the scoffer of Proverbs, the most hopeless figure in the book of wisdom. He is not the naive young person who simply has not learned yet, nor the dull person who learns slowly. The scoffer is the one whose problem is his attitude, not his ability: he treats correction as beneath him, sneers at the people trying to teach him, and turns every rebuke into something to ridicule. Proverbs warns that you cannot fix him by reasoning with him, only contain the damage he does to others.

The action behind the noun is a kind of speech that twists what is plain into mockery. Where one person speaks to carry the truth across to another, the scoffer bends his words into derision instead. That is why the same Hebrew root that produces an honest go-between (see the second meaning) also produces its opposite: the scoffer is a spokesman gone wrong, using the gift of speech in reverse.

In Proverbs the scoffer belongs to the home and the classroom, the youth who refuses his teacher. In the prophets the word turns public and political: it names the arrogant leaders of Jerusalem and the plotters at a drunken king's table. One of its sharpest lines is a reversal: God scoffs at the scoffers, answering proud contempt with contempt in kind.

The same Hebrew root that gives us the scoffer also gives us its honorable opposite: the person who carries words across a gap so two sides can understand each other. The clearest picture is the interpreter standing between Joseph and his brothers in Genesis, translating between Egyptian and Hebrew. From there the word stretches in different directions: a royal envoy sent between courts, the religious leaders meant to speak for their people, and, most strikingly, a heavenly advocate who pleads for a suffering man before God.

What ties these together with the scoffer is the underlying picture of speech that travels by an indirect route.

• the interpreter routes one person's words through another language
• the envoy routes a king's message to a foreign court
• the advocate routes a person's case up to God

The mocker, by contrast, is this same go-between corrupted, twisting words into ridicule rather than passing on the truth.

Over the course of the Bible this honorable sense climbs upward, from an ordinary court translator, to human spokesmen, to an angelic advocate in God's presence. Jewish tradition later borrowed a Greek word for "advocate" (παράκλητος) to render it, and the phrase "a righteous advocate" still survives in synagogue prayers for the Day of Atonement.