petsa

The lexicons converge on the sense with unusual firmness. BDB (1906, p. 822) glosses the noun "bruise, wound" and the verb "bruise, wound by bruising"; HALOT gives "Wunde, Quetschung"; the eighteenth edition of Gesenius (Meyer, Donner, Ruterswoerden, 2009) retains "Wunde" for the noun and "verwunden, quetschen" for the verb; DCH (Clines, vol. 6), following its usage-based policy, catalogues the collocations without etymology, noting the recurrent pairing with חַבּוּרָה at Genesis 4:23, Exodus 21:25, Isaiah 1:6 and Proverbs 20:30, and with מַכָּה at Isaiah 1:6. NIDOTTE no. 7204 (Michael L. Brown) mounts the fullest modern defense of the traditional Jewish-exegetical distinction between פֶּצַע as an open, bleeding cut and חַבּוּרָה as a closed contusion. Alonso Schokel offers the sharpest discrimination in the field: פֶּצַע is the break in the skin, חַבּוּרָה the subcutaneous bruise, מַכָּה the blow or its generic result, and מָזוֹר the festering sore that must be pressed out. Neither TDOT nor TLOT carries a dedicated article on the root, which is treated only inside the articles on נכה, מכה and חבל. The chief difference among the lexicons is one of emphasis: BDB places "bruise" first, while HALOT, Gesenius and NIDOTTE foreground the open cut.

Comparative Semitics yields a mostly negative result: the root cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Semitic. CAD and AHw register no Akkadian paṣaʿu, and Akkadian uses maḫaṣu (Hebrew מחץ) for wounding; DUL shows Ugaritic likewise using mḫṣ; Leslau records nothing in Geʿez; and, as both HALOT and Gesenius flag, Syriac does not attest the root, Payne Smith registering no productive pṣʿ. HALOT rejects the older equation with Akkadian pašaṭu as phonologically impossible, since Hebrew ṣ does not correspond to Akkadian š, and accepts Arabic faṣaʿa (Lane; Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-ʿArab), "to press or peel open so that the outer skin breaks," as the one cognate with any consensus. The Aramaic evidence, per Sokoloff, is confined to Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian, most plausibly as a Hebraism or shared innovation. Within Hebrew the word sits in a productive family of p-ṣ verbs (פצח, פצל, פצם, פצץ) whose shared notion is forcing something open, which supports an original sense of splitting the skin so as to produce a gaping wound.

The Septuagint corroborates the differentiation. The dominant equivalence is פֶּצַע rendered τραῦμα (Genesis 4:23; Exodus 21:25; Proverbs 27:6; Isaiah 1:6) against μώλωψ for חַבּוּרָה, and Isaiah 1:6 carefully distinguishes all three injury terms, adding πληγὴ φλεγμαίνουσα for מַכָּה טְרִיָּה. Muraoka glosses τραῦμα as a wound mostly resulting from external violence and especially involving a cut or laceration. The freer Proverbs and Job translators prefer συντρίμματα at Proverbs 20:30, Proverbs 23:29 and Job 9:17, reserving τραύματα for the memorable saying at Proverbs 27:6. A related point of frequent confusion is worth correcting: Isaiah 53:5 reads חַבּוּרָה, rendered μώλωψ and quoted at 1 Peter 2:24, not פֶּצַע.

Two text-critical questions remain live. At Job 9:17 the consonants admit both בִּסְעָרָה ("with a tempest") and בְּשַׂעֲרָה ("for a hair," that is, for a trifle); Clines and Pope defend the latter as the better parallel to חִנָּם in the second colon, while Dhorme, Habel, Hartley, Seow, Alter and Balentine prefer the storm, read as an ironic anticipation of the whirlwind of Job 38:1. Either way the plural noun keeps its concrete force and functions as evidence in Job's forensic complaint. At Proverbs 20:30 the phrase חַבֻּרוֹת פֶּצַע is syntactically awkward and תַּמְרִיק does not agree with its plural subject; Waltke defends the received text as a single expression, "wounding blows," tied to the metallurgical image of scouring, Fox concedes the difficulty while reaching a comparable sense, and Toy judged the text corrupt. Elsewhere transmission is clean: the Great Isaiah Scroll confirms the Masoretic Text at Isaiah 1:6 without substantive variant, and the Septuagint and Peshitta agree with it throughout. Qumran preserves no direct witness at the other occurrences.