lazy and sluggish; the habitually work-avoiding person Proverbs calls the sluggard
This word appears only in the book of Proverbs, and every time it names the same figure: the lazy person, the "sluggard." It is an adjective, but Proverbs uses it almost entirely as a label for a type of person, the way we might just call someone "a lazy one."
Proverbs draws this figure with sharp, almost comic pictures:
- He turns over on his bed the way a door swings on its hinge, busy but going nowhere (Proverbs 26:14).
- He dips his hand into the dish but is too worn out to lift the food back to his mouth (Proverbs 19:24; 26:15).
- He will not go outside because "there is a lion in the road," an excuse everyone can see through (Proverbs 22:13; 26:13).
These are not portraits of a tired worker having a hard day, but of someone who has made avoiding effort a way of life.
The point is always moral, not medical. The sluggard's laziness is a settled choice, and it carries consequences: cravings that are never satisfied, a field overgrown with weeds and its wall broken down (Proverbs 24:30-31), and poverty that arrives unbidden. Proverbs sets him against the person who works hard, and even against the slack hand (רְמִיָּה) that brings ruin, holding him up as a warning rather than an object of pity.