midyan

HALOT, BDB, and DCH all gloss מִדְיָן as "strife, contention," and treat it as a byform of מָדוֹן, a mem-preformative noun built on the root דין ("to judge, contend"), the same root that yields דִּין ("legal case, judgment") and דַּיָּן ("judge"). All ten occurrences fall in Proverbs and all are plural: nine absolute (מִדְיָנִים) and one construct (מִדְיְנֵי, Proverbs 19:13). The dominant collocation is אֵשֶׁת מִדְיָנִים, "a woman of contentions," at Proverbs 21:9, 21:19, 25:24, and 27:15, with the masculine counterpart אִישׁ מִדְיָנִים at Proverbs 26:21; Waltke and Fox both take these as fixed idioms in which the plural abstract functions attributively rather than as a genuine plural count noun. Proverbs 21:9 and 25:24 are a verbatim doublet, and 19:13 and 27:15 share the dripping-roof simile, which the commentators read as a deliberate editorial linkage across collections. The best-known textual crux touching this lemma is the Masoretic vacillation among מָדוֹן, מִדְיָן/מִדְיָנִים, and מְדָן/מְדָנִים in the Proverbs sayings, several verses carrying a Kethiv with a Qere adjustment; BHS and the critical commentaries treat these as orthographic and morphological variants of one lexical family rather than semantically distinct words, and the Greek tradition renders them indifferently with ἔρις, μάχη, and ἀντιλογία. At Proverbs 18:18 the association of the lot with the settlement of disputes (compare Joshua 7:14 to 18 and 1 Samuel 14:41 to 42) gives the noun a forensic coloring for McKane and Clifford, though Fox resists narrowing it to formal litigation. Proverbs 18:19 is textually the hardest of the ten: the Masoretic Text lacks a comparative particle where the sense requires one, and the Septuagint diverges substantially, but no proposal disturbs the lexical value of מִדְיָנִים in the second colon. The sense of the word is not in dispute at any point in the discussion.