Proverbs 5:20

Proverbs 5 opens with a father pleading with his son to listen to wisdom, and most of the chapter up to this point describes the strange woman, the adulteress. Her words are smooth and her charm is deceptive, but her end is bitter, and the man who goes to her loses his strength, his wealth and his honour and goes down toward the grave (Proverbs 5:1–14). The father’s counsel is to stay well away: “Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house” (Proverbs 5:8).

With verse 15 he turns from what his son must avoid to what he is free to enjoy. God’s answer to temptation here is a marriage that is faithful, full and glad, so that the son has somewhere better to go. The warnings return in verse 20 and run on through Proverbs 6 and Proverbs 7, and in the middle of them stands this picture of married love as a well of fresh water.

The father speaks as a father to his son, so the words are addressed to a husband about his wife. What they teach about faithfulness and delight belongs to wives as well, as the question under verse 19 shows.

“Drink” is shâthâh, the ordinary verb for drinking, and here it is a command. It can also mean to take in and enjoy what a source gives, and that is the sense the father wants: his son is to take his refreshment from what is his own.

Water was precious in Israel and often scarce. A cistern, bôwr, was a reservoir cut into the rock to catch the rain, and a well, bᵉʼêr, was a shaft dug down to the water underground. A household that had its own was secure, and it guarded that water carefully. The waters, mayim, picture the refreshment and satisfaction of married love, and the words “thine own” stand in both lines of the verse: his own cistern, his own well, and so his own wife.

“Running waters” translates nâzal, a verb for water that flows, trickles or gushes out. Flowing water is fresh, and the picture tells the son that the love of his own marriage keeps on refreshing him. The second line repeats the first and strengthens it, as Hebrew poetry often does.

Proverbs later sets beside this the “stolen waters” that are said to be sweet, the waters of an illicit love that end in death (Proverbs 9:17–18). Paul gives the same counsel in practical terms when he tells husbands and wives to give each other what is due, so that temptation finds no opening (1 Corinthians 7:2–5).

Verse 16 follows straight on from verse 15 and is best read as a question or a warning: should your springs be scattered abroad, and your streams of water in the streets? The KJV’s “Let” reads like a wish, but in this setting the father is describing what happens when the son ignores verse 15, and verse 17 gives the answer, “Let them be only thine own.”

“Fountains” is maʻyân, a spring of fresh water, a word drawn from a root meaning “eye”. “Dispersed” is pûwts, to scatter abroad, a verb that can also mean to break or dash in pieces. “Streets” is rᵉchôb, a wide place or public square, the open ground where people gathered and traded. Springs running out into the square are spilled where anyone may tread, and the picture is of a man’s intimate life spent on whoever comes, with the public shame that follows. The fountains stand for the marriage as the source of intimacy and of children, so what is wasted is the life a faithful marriage would have given.

The Song of Solomon gives the opposite picture when it calls the bride an enclosed garden and a sealed fountain (Song of Solomon 4:12).

“Them” in verse 17 means the waters and fountains of verses 15 and 16. The father commands that they be his son’s alone. “Strangers” is zûwr, from a root meaning to turn aside. It describes someone foreign or outside the family, and in Proverbs it is used of the adulteress and of anyone outside the marriage with whom intimacy is forbidden. The words “with thee” make the point personal, because sharing these waters with a stranger betrays the wife who shares them with him.

This rests on God’s first word about marriage, that a man shall leave his father and mother, cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh (Genesis 2:24). Israel’s law guarded that union with the death penalty for adultery (Deuteronomy 22:22, Leviticus 20:10), and Proverbs counts the cost to the man who goes after another man’s wife in ruin, poverty and a lost name (Proverbs 6:26–35). The verses that follow, through the end of the chapter, set the joy of faithfulness beside the bitter end of unfaithfulness (Proverbs 5:18–23).

Jesus carries this into the heart. He teaches that a man who looks on a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart (Matthew 5:28), so “only thine own” governs a man’s thoughts and desires as well as his body.

The “fountain” of verse 18 shares its English word with verse 16, but the Hebrew is a different word, mâqôwr. At root it means something dug, and so a spring or source of water. Figuratively it can be a source of happiness, of wisdom or of offspring, and here it is the wife, as the source of her husband’s delight and the mother of his children.

“Blessed” is bârak, a verb whose root sense is to kneel. It is used both for blessing God in worship and for God’s blessing on people. To let the fountain be blessed is to want God’s favour on the marriage and on its fruitfulness, and Scripture calls the children born into it a heritage from the LORD (Psalm 127:3).

“Rejoice” is sâmach, to be glad, to feel and show great joy. The verb can describe gladness of any kind, good or bad, and here it is gladness in the right place, with the right person. The father sets married love among the joys of life and commands his son to enjoy it.

Verse 19 is the warmest verse of the chapter. The hind is a female deer and the roe a female wild goat or ibex, animals known for grace, beauty and gentleness. The Song of Solomon draws on the same creatures, charging the daughters of Jerusalem “by the roes, and by the hinds of the field” (Song of Solomon 2:7). The husband is to see his wife as lovely and delightful, and to keep seeing her that way.

“Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times” is frank about the physical side of marriage. “Satisfy” is râvâh, to slake thirst, to drink one’s fill, to water abundantly, so the water picture of verse 15 carries on into this line. “At all times” is built on ʻêth, “time”, and “always” in the next line is tâmîyd, “continually”. This delight is meant to last for the whole of a marriage.

“Ravished” is shâgâh. Its root sense is to stray or go wrong, and by extension, through the idea of being drunk, to reel or be enraptured. Here it is used in its good sense, of a husband so taken with his wife’s love, ʼahăbâh, that he is lost in it. The word for love simply means love or affection. The same verb comes back in verse 20, and the father has chosen it on purpose: a man will be carried away by something, and his wife’s love is the right place for it.

Verse 20 brings the father’s case to its point in one question. He addresses his son, bên, as “my son”, the tone of a loving father who cares what becomes of him. “Why wilt thou” asks him to think: with a blessed fountain of his own and a wife whose love can hold him all his life, what sense is there in going to someone else?

“Ravished” is shâgâh again, now in its darker sense. The man who goes to the adulteress is led astray, intoxicated by desire until he loses his judgment and his way. Proverbs shows this happening to the young man drawn away by her smooth talk (Proverbs 7:21–23). “Strange woman” is zarah and “stranger” is nokriyah, built on nokrîy, which means strange or foreign, and of a woman an adulteress. Her strangeness is that she stands outside his marriage, whatever her nation. “Embrace the bosom”, châbaq and cheyq, is a modest way of naming the act itself, the close embrace of a lap or bosom that belongs to his wife alone.

The two halves of the verse say the same thing twice, and the question answers itself. Paul gives the New Testament’s answer in a single command, to flee sexual sin, because the believer’s body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and was bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:18–20).

The water of this passage points beyond marriage to the Lord who made it. Through Jeremiah, God grieves that his people have forsaken him and dug for themselves “broken cisterns, that can hold no water” (Jeremiah 2:13). Jesus offers the living water that truly satisfies (John 4:10–14) and promises that rivers of living water will flow from those who believe in him (John 7:37–38). The thirst that sends a man to stolen waters is met in Christ.

Paul says that marriage itself is a picture of Christ and the church. Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, to make her holy and present her to himself without spot or blemish (Ephesians 5:25–32). The faithful, glad love of verses 15 to 19 is a small likeness of his love for his people, and the church is called to the same single-hearted devotion to him. Scripture ends with that love fulfilled at the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7–9) and the holy city made ready for him (Revelation 21:2).

Christ is also the wisdom this father has been urging on his son, for God has made him our wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:30). Where a man or woman has already taken the path of verse 20, there is forgiveness for all who confess their sins (1 John 1:9), and the one who is joined to Christ is raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).

These verses show God giving good things as well as guarding them. He made marriage as a well of fresh water, a lifelong gladness between one husband and one wife, and he wants it blessed, enjoyed and kept whole. The father’s warnings are real, and the ruin of adultery is real, but the heart of this passage is an invitation to joy, and the God who gives it is the same God who satisfies every thirst in his Son.