parash

At bottom this verb is about setting something apart so that it stands out sharply. That single idea is why so few verses can stretch across a legal ruling, a public reading, and a sheep parted from the flock: in each case something is lifted out of the surrounding vagueness and becomes distinct.

Two of its appearances sit inside the same kind of story. A man commits an offense for which nobody has a precedent, so he is held in custody until the LORD's decision is made plain (Leviticus 24:12, Numbers 15:34). The word is not simply "announce". The point is that the case was genuinely open, and the decision cuts it into shape.

The same idea runs in three directions across only four verses:

• a ruling that settles a case nobody yet knew how to judge (Leviticus 24:12, Numbers 15:34)
• a reading of the law that the hearers could actually follow (Nehemiah 8:8)
• sheep parted off from the flock a shepherd is looking over (Ezekiel 34:12)

Later Hebrew and Aramaic ran hard with this root, which is where the ordinary word for a written explanation comes from, and, on the usual account, the name of the Pharisees, "the separated ones". Be careful of a near-twin: a different verb (פָּרַשׂ) spelled with one dot moved means to spread something out, like hands lifted in prayer or a cloth laid over furniture, and the two are easily confused.

One line in Proverbs uses a form of this spelling for what a snake does to a drinker at the end of a long night: wine "bites like a serpent" and does this "like an adder" (Proverbs 23:32). Because the word appears nowhere else in this shape, its sense is worked out from the matching phrase beside it rather than from other examples.

That is why English versions settle on "stings", and why the reference works part company over the word. Some keep it apart from the verb for making a matter plain, treating the two as look-alikes that happen to share a spelling. Others try to hold them together, hearing in the fangs a splitting or dividing of the flesh. A further suggestion reads the picture as venom sprayed rather than skin punctured. The one thing the verse itself makes certain is the effect: whatever the snake does, it hurts, and it comes last.