to mutter against someone under the breath: to grumble in private, or to whisper talk that turns people against each other
This word describes talk pitched low. Not a shout of protest but a mutter, discontent spoken where the person it targets cannot hear it. Twice the Bible sets the scene in the tents at the end of the day, after bad news has come in and the camp has broken into small groups.
From that one picture the word reaches in two directions. In the wilderness story it is a whole people muttering against God, saying in the dark what they will not say to his face. In Proverbs it is a single person, the whisperer, and four short sayings watch what his talk does:
- his words go down like choice morsels, swallowed whole and kept
- take him out of the room and the quarrel dies like a fire starved of wood
- he can pry apart friends who were the closest of companions
Hebrew has other words for complaining out loud in public (לוּן) and for the man who carries reports from house to house (רָכִיל). This one is quieter than either. Its fault is not volume, and not the spreading of information, but the aim: talk about someone, behind their back, that leaves them with less than they had.
The last time the word appears it sits inside a promise. Isaiah says that the grumblers will learn instruction, which is to say that the habit is not incurable.