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Psalm 12:6, 119:140, and Proverbs 30:5 claim every word of Yahweh is pure, refined like silver. The SAB then lines up 2 Kings 18:27 / Isaiah 36:12 (eating dung and drinking piss), Ezekiel 23:20 (flesh of asses, issue of horses), Habakkuk 2:16 (foreskin uncovered), and Malachi 2:3 (dung on faces) as examples of scriptural language that does not fit any sane definition of "pure." The contradiction here depends on what "pure" is doing in the wisdom claim.
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Psalm 12:6 Thy word is very pure: therefore thy servant loveth it. Psalm 119:140 Every word of God is pure. Proverbs 30:5
Cited passages
Yahweh’s words are flawless words, as silver refined in a clay furnace, purified seven times.
Your promises have been thoroughly tested, and your servant loves them.
“Every word of God is flawless. He is a shield to those who take refuge in him.
Cited passages
But Rabshakeh said to them, “Has my master sent me to your master and to you, to speak these words? Hasn’t he sent me to the men who sit on the wall, to eat their own dung, and to drink their own urine with you?”
But Rabshakeh said, “Has my master sent me only to your master and to you, to speak these words, and not to the men who sit on the wall, who will eat their own dung and drink their own urine with you?”
She lusted after their lovers, whose flesh is as the flesh of donkeys, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.
You are filled with shame, and not glory. You will also drink, and be exposed! The cup of Yahweh’s right hand will come around to you, and disgrace will cover your glory.
Notes on manuscript readings that bear on this passage — where the surviving witnesses differ over what the text says. Presented for transparency as the textual critic’s description, not as GEBible’s conclusion about the tension.
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
This entry needs more lexical care than the SAB framing supplies, and once that care is applied the proffered prooftexts misfire while a real but differently located problem comes into view. The Hebrew of the purity claims is specific. Psalm 12:7 (MT; English 12:6) describes "imrot YHWH (the sayings of Yahweh) as tehorot, from tahor — clean, pure — and likens them to silver tsaruph (refined) in a furnace, purified sevenfold. Proverbs 30:5 uses tseruphah, the same metallurgical image from tsaraph, to refine. Psalm 119:140 calls Yahweh's word tserupah me'od, thoroughly refined. The semantic field is purity-as-tested-reliability, the assayer's image of metal with the dross burned off. The claim is about the trustworthiness and integrity of divine revelation, not about whether scripture's diction is decorous.
That is why the apologetic response (Archer; Geisler and Howe) is correct on the SAB's chosen examples. Hebrew prophetic and narrative literature deploys deliberately coarse language for theological ends, and coarseness is not impurity in the relevant sense. Ezekiel 23 is the extreme case: the allegory of Oholah and Oholibah describes the sisters' lust in language whose explicitness Moshe Greenberg analyzes as calculated prophetic shock. Habakkuk 2:16 and Malachi 2:3 use scatological and shaming imagery as instruments of judgment oracle. None of this contradicts a claim about the reliability of God's word; it only contradicts a claim no one in the texts is making, namely that scripture is genteel.
The 2 Kings 18:27 / Isaiah 36:12 case is especially instructive because the tradition itself flagged the language. The Rabshakeh's taunt that the besieged will "eat their own dung and drink their own piss" preserves a Ketib/Qere variation: the written consonantal text (Ketib) has the blunt terms hare'ehem (their dung) and shenehem/meymey raglehem, while the Masoretes supplied euphemistic Qere readings to be vocalized aloud — tso'atam for the excrement and meymey raglehem (literally "water of their feet") for the urine. Cogan and Tadmor note the scribal discomfort. The text knows its own vocabulary is rough and softens it in reading; this is evidence of editorial sensibility, not of impure revelation.
The genuine tension the question gropes toward lies elsewhere. If "every word of God is pure" is pressed into a doctrine of verbal inerrancy and pristine transmission, critical scholarship offers far harder counter-evidence than vulgar diction. Emanuel Tov and Eugene Ulrich have documented the pluriformity of the text: the books circulated in variant editions. The Septuagint of Jeremiah is roughly one-eighth (about 2,700 words) shorter than the Masoretic Jeremiah and arranges the oracles differently, and Qumran preserved a short Hebrew Vorlage (4QJer-b) matching the LXX alongside a long edition matching the MT — two divergent "pure words" of the same prophet. The Pentateuchal sources disagree on narrative particulars. Confronted with this, the question "which pure word?" has no single answer, and the slogan strains under historical scrutiny.
So the verdict splits. As stated, the contradiction is overstated: the purity claim is about reliability, not register, and the dung-and-piss prooftexts trade on an equivocation the Hebrew does not support — the Masoretes themselves euphemized them. The residual difficulty is real but belongs to textual criticism rather than to vocabulary: a doctrine of perfectly preserved "pure words" sits uneasily with demonstrable textual pluriformity.
Where the critical reading lands: SAB prooftexts overstated/equivocal; the serious version of the problem is transmission, not diction.
Sources for this reading