The two parallel lines in this verse give the reasons for obeying the commands of the previous verse.

“For disaster from them will rise suddenly”: “Disaster” is a term that Revised Standard Version usually renders “calamity.” See the comments on 1.26-27 and 6.15. The verb “will rise” is better expressed in this context as “will come” or “comes” (New Revised Standard Version). The Hebrew rendered “disaster from them” is actually “their calamity,” in which the pronoun “their” could refer either to “the Lord and the king” or to “those who rebel against them.” Revised Standard Version takes the sense to be “disaster comes from them [the Lord and the king],” whereas Good News Translation takes it that the disaster comes upon the people who rebel: “such people could be ruined. . ..” There is not much difference between the two possibilities, since even if we take the pronoun as referring to the people who rebel, we must still understand that the Lord and the king are the source of the disaster. This is well expressed in the restructuring of New International Version: “for those two will send sudden destruction upon them.”

“And who knows the ruin that will come from them both?”: This line has the same sense as the previous line. The words “who knows” make it a rhetorical question; the meaning is that “nobody knows” or “we don’t know,” with the unstated element that the calamity will be too big or too bad to think about. The term “ruin” matches “disaster”, and in this case the Hebrew expression “the ruin that will come from them both” is literally “ruin of the two of them,” which can only refer back to “the Lord and the king.” There is no verb in the Hebrew, so Revised Standard Version adds “will come” to complete the sentence. Another way to structure the sentence is “. . . the disaster that God or the king can cause” (Good News Translation).

In some languages it may be desirable to restructure the whole verse so that “the Lord and the king” is the subject; for example, “for these two can bring destruction on people quickly, and no one knows how big their destruction is.” Since the two lines of this verse are so similar in meaning, Contemporary English Version combines them and says, “Who knows what sudden disaster the Lord or a ruler might bring?”

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 .