WORTHLESSNESS, good-for-nothingness — possibly beli-ya'al, 'without profit / no use.' It brands a person as ruinous and lawless: 'sons of beliyaal' are scoundrels (the men of Gibeah, Judges 19-20; Eli's sons, 1 Samuel 2:12; the false witnesses against Naboth, 1 Kings 21:10). ⚠ Nahum 1:11 calls the Assyrian king 'a counselor of beliyaal' — a schemer of worthlessness against God. And the word has a long afterlife: over the centuries beliyaal hardened from a quality into a proper NAME, so that by the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament 'BELIAL' is a title for Satan himself — 'what agreement has Christ with Belial?' (2 Corinthians 6:15). This translation keeps the earlier, common-noun sense ('worthlessness') and flags the name it became; the Douay, reading it as the name already, prints 'Belial.' ⭐ Deuteronomy 13:14 is the word's FIRST occurrence in the Hebrew Bible — searched consonantally across the whole text, it stands in twenty-six verses and only two of them are in the Torah, that one and Deuteronomy 15:9. So it enters the Bible as a legal description of the men who talk a town into apostasy, and does its real work afterwards. ⭐ Deuteronomy 15:9 is now on these pages, and it is the second of those two Torah verses — and the only one of them that describes a THING rather than people. There it is a davar, a word or a piece of private arithmetic: lest there be a word in your heart, a word of worthlessness, saying, the seventh year is near. Deuteronomy has one maximum-strength noun for human ruinousness; it spends it on organised apostasy in chapter 13 and on a lender counting months in chapter 15. ⚠ The construction is not unique outside the Torah — devar beliyya’al also stands in two psalms (41:9 in the Hebrew, 41:8 in English Bibles; and 101:3) — and at 2 Samuel 22:5 the word describes torrents rather than people, so it is not true that it always names a man. ⚠ The KJV alone attaches the adjective to the wrong noun at 15:9, reading ‘a thought in thy wicked heart’ where the ASV, the NWT, the NIV and all three Spanish witnesses attach it to the thought. → first discussed at Nahum 1:11