TO BE LIGHT, slight — and so to be DISHONOURED, held cheap; the passive niqlah is the state of a man whose weight has gone. The root is the mirror of kavod, weight, which is Hebrew's word for honour, and Isaiah 3:5 (not yet on these pages) sets the two as classes of men, the light against the weighty. ⭐ Deuteronomy 25:3 makes it the reason a flogging stops at forty: one blow more and your brother is made light in your eyes — a sentence measured in standing rather than in skin, and the convicted man is still your brother. ⚠ David uses it of himself at 1 Samuel 18:23, a poor man and lightly esteemed, and Isaiah 16:14 of the glory of Moab made light; Jeremiah 6:14 and 8:11 turn the root into an adverb, a wound healed lightly (none yet on these pages). ⚠ It is a cousin of qalal, to make light of, to curse — two roots on one idea, that contempt is a loss of weight — and not the same word; a third homonym, to roast (Psalm 38:8's burning loins), shares the letters and nothing else. The shelf reads 'seem vile' (KJV, ASV), 'appear despised' (Geneva), 'degraded' (NIV, TLB), 'disgraced' (NWT 1984) and, after its Latin, 'shamefully torn' (Douay). ⭐ Its causative, maqleh, is the second of Deuteronomy 27’s twelve curses: cursed is he who makes light of his father or his mother (27:16, now on these pages) — a form in one verse of the Hebrew Bible, and the exact opposite of the commandment’s honour, kabbed, make heavy. Ezekiel 22:7 (not yet on these pages) indicts Jerusalem with the same verb, father and mother they made light of in you. → first discussed at Deut 25:3