20:11
In this verse, the second line further describes the means by which a person is known.
11a Even a young man is known by his actions—
11b whether his conduct is pure and upright.
The overall meaning is that a person’s actions show what his character is like, even if he is young.
20:11a
Even a young man is known by his actions: The word Even in this clause implies that the category of a young man is unexpected here. Even a young person’s character is evident in his actions. So it is implied that of course this would also be true of adults. Some other ways to translate this clause are:
Even children are known by their behavior (New Century Version)
-or-
Even children show what they are by what they do (Good News Translation)
a young man: The word that the Berean Standard Bible translates here as a young man can refer to any male from infancy up to early adulthood. (See the note on “to the young” in 1:4b.) In that verse, it probably referred to young people nearing adulthood. Here it probably refers to a younger child. Most versions translate this word as “a child” or “children.”
20:11b
whether his conduct is pure and upright: This line clarifies that the first line is talking about actions or behavior that reveal a person’s moral character.
pure: The word pure refers here to actions that are clean, innocent, or blameless. A different form of the word pure was used in 20:9a.
upright: The word that the Berean Standard Bible translates here as upright refers in this context to actions that are straight or righteous. The Berean Standard Bible translates the same word as “upright” in 11:3a. See the note there.
Some other ways to translate 20:11b are:
if his behavior is pure and straight (New Jerusalem Bible)
-or-
their actions show if they are innocent and good (New Century Version)
© 2012, 2016, 2020 by SIL International®
Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC BY-SA) creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0.
All Scripture quotations in this publication, unless otherwise indicated, are from The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible.
BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.