▼tn Heb “a witness of truth”; cf. CEV “an honest witness.”

▼tn The noun נְפָשׁוֹת (nefashot) often means “souls,” but here “lives”—it functions as a metonymy for life (BDB 659 s.v. נֶפֶשׁ 3.c).

▼sn The setting of this proverb is the courtroom. One who tells the truth “saves” (מַצִּיל [matsil, “rescues; delivers”]) the lives of those falsely accused.

▼tc In the MT the verb lacks agreement with the two nouns in either gender or number so that there is no clear subject: “but he breathes lies, deceit.” Revocalizing the consonants from וְיָפִחַ (veyafiakh, “and he breathes/testifies”) to וִיפֵחַ (vifeakh, “and a witness [of lies]”) and from מִרְמָה (mirmah, “deceit”) to the Piel participle מְרַמֶּה (merammeh, “betrays, deceives, leads astray”) produces a grammatically acceptable text. One may also supply by parallelism “…betrays lives.”