Proverb — the book's own title is its plural, Mishlei, 'the proverbs of Solomon' (1:1). A mashal is a saying that rules by LIKENESS (the root means both 'to be like' and 'to rule'): a comparison compact enough to govern a life. It stretches from a one-line saw to a taunt-song to Jesus' parables (the Greek Bible renders both mashal and its cousins parabolē). ⭐ Numbers 21:27 is the taunt-song end of that range, and it supplies a form found nowhere else: ha-moshlim, ‘those who speak in mashal’, stands in exactly one verse of the Hebrew Bible, introducing a captured Amorite ballad that mocks Moab. The shelf hears it three ways — proverb-sayers (KJV, ASV, Geneva, Douay, RV 1909, RV60), poets (NIV, TLB, NVI), and mockers (NWT 1984 ‘the sayers of mock verses’, TNM 1987 «versos burlescos») — and the third is what that passage actually needs. ⚠ There is also a joke in the word no version can print: the root means both ‘to be like’ and ‘to RULE’, so the verse-makers and the king they are singing about are spelled the same. ⚠ Numbers 23:7 and 23:18 use the noun for something else again: Balaam takes up his mashal, and what follows is formal verse delivered as a verdict. The shelf hears that register three ways — parable (KJV, ASV, Geneva, Douay, and both Reina-Valeras), message (NIV, NVI), proverbial utterance (NWT 1984) — and this translation prints 'oracle'. ⚠ Numbers 24 uses the root five times in twenty-five verses — more than any other chapter in the Torah, where the next highest is three — and three of those introduce oracles only two lines long, so the word covers a formal poem and a two-line verdict equally. → first discussed at Gen 1:1