«اِلْمَشْنَقَةْ مَاتِتْ بِحَسْرِةْ مَدْيُونْ»

The gallows is personified as an instrument of justice that has already taken its revenge by executing a killer, yet it dies of grief because a debtor escapes its penalty. This is figurative imagery, not a claim about how any legal system works. Debt was not punished by execution, so the saying concerns that particular gap.

Read as irony, the image turns a tool of retribution into a disappointed creditor's proxy, mocking the distance between what the law can punish and what a lender may want. The point is narrow: the saying should not be stretched to cover every obligation or offender, since it turns on the fact that debt does not carry a death sentence.

Used by a debtor to answer a creditor's threats with defiant irony: even the gallows cannot punish an unpaid debt with death. The speaker mocks the creditor's power to intimidate, rather than describing a dispute that has already ended.