madon

The critical lexicons agree on the sense. HALOT, BDB, and DCH all give מָדוֹן I as "strife, contention," a noun formed with prefixed mem from the root דין ("to judge, contend"), and the same root supplies דִּין ("legal case, judgment") and the personal noun דַּיָּן. Of the ten occurrences, seven fall in Proverbs, where the word functions as a fixed term in the sayings on quarreling, most often as the object of גרה in the hiphil ("stir up") at Proverbs 15:18, 28:25, and 29:22, and set in parallel with רִיב at 15:18 and 17:14. HALOT and BDB both single out the two occurrences with a following lamed of disadvantage (Psalm 80:7 MT, English 80:6; Jeremiah 15:10) as a distinct nuance, "object of contention," and commentators on both passages follow this: the sufferer is not the agent of quarreling but the focus of everyone else's hostility. At Habakkuk 1:3 the pair רִיב וּמָדוֹן stands within a catalogue of social breakdown, and Andersen and Freedman read it against the paralysis of תּוֹרָה and מִשְׁפָּט in verse 4, giving the pair a forensic coloring. The most-discussed textual question concerns the Proverbs sayings, where the Masoretic tradition vacillates among מָדוֹן, the plural מִדְיָנִים (frequently a Kethiv with a Qere adjustment), and מְדָנִים; BHS and the Proverbs commentaries treat these as orthographic and morphological variants of one lexical family rather than as semantically distinct words, and the Greek tradition renders them indifferently with ἔρις, μάχη, and ἀντιλογία. The lexical sense itself is not in dispute at any point in the discussion.