“Make no friendship with a man given to anger”: “Make no friendship” (New Revised Standard Version “Make no friends”) is more naturally expressed in English as “Don’t make friends” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version) or “Never make friends” (Revised English Bible). “A man given to anger” renders the Hebrew idiom “master of anger,” meaning someone who is angry by nature. Languages in different parts of the world have equivalent idioms to this, and they can be well used in translation; in one large Pacific language, for example, the idiom is “man bilong kros kwik,” “person who gets cross easily.” In English, people talk about someone with “a bad temper” or “a hot temper.”

“Nor go with a wrathful man”: This is parallel to the previous line and very similar in meaning. The sense of “go with” is “be friendly with,” and “a wrathful man” is the idiom “a man of rages,” where the term for “rage” literally means “heat.” This is rendered in English as “hot-tempered” (Revised English Bible) or “quick-tempered” (New Jerusalem Bible).

Because the two lines are so similar in meaning, some translations combine them into a single warning statement; for example, Contemporary English Version has “Don’t make friends with anyone who has a bad temper” and New Living Translation “Keep away from angry, short-tempered people.”

Quoted with permission from Reyburn, William D. and Fry, Euan McG. A Handbook on Proverbs. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .