Proverbs 5: Drink Water from Thine Own Cistern

"For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil: but her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword. Her feet go down to death" (5:3–5). The danger is speech: flattery and promise. The bitterness comes later.

"Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house: lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel: lest strangers be filled with thy wealth" (5:8–10). The losses are social and economic: reputation, years of work, property gone to others. The imagined end is a man groaning "How have I hated instruction… I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation" (5:12–14), exposed before the whole community.

"Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well… Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe… be thou ravished always with her love" (5:15–19). The poem turns from warning to celebration. Marital love is good, delightful, and to be enjoyed for life.

"For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD… His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins" (5:21–22).

Cisterns and wells

In the hill country of Judah, families depended on plastered cisterns cut in rock to store winter rain; a private well or cistern was valuable property. "Drink from your own cistern" means: find your delight in your own wife. Verse 16 ("Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad") is difficult: many translations make it a question ("Should your springs be scattered abroad?"), warning against wasting oneself or against a wife's straying; the Greek reads it as a command not to let your waters flow out. The image is about exclusive faithfulness.

Wormwood

La'anah, wormwood (a bitter plant of the Artemisia family), is a common biblical image of bitterness (Deuteronomy 29:18; Amos 5:7). Honey and oil, sweet and smooth, are set against it.

Who is addressed

The speaker is a father; the hearer a young man. The chapter warns him against another man's wife and celebrates his own. It reflects a society where men moved in public and controlled property, and it speaks to the man's responsibility. It does not portray women as the source of evil: the same book praises the wise woman (14:1; 31:10–31) and describes the young man as "void of understanding" (7:7). Modern readers apply its point about faithfulness to both partners.

Adultery and its costs

Israel's law treated adultery as a capital offence (Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:22), though Proverbs never mentions a court; it stresses social and economic ruin and the husband's revenge (6:34–35). How often the death penalty was enforced is unknown.

Sexual imagery

Water, fountain, deer (5:15–19) are images of sexual love also found in the Song of Songs (4:12–15). The plain sexual meaning is part of the text's point: desire within marriage is blessed.

An Egyptian parallel

The Egyptian Instruction of Any (New Kingdom, roughly the 13th century BC) warns: "Beware of a woman who is a stranger, one not known in her town… a deep water whose course is unknown, such is a woman away from her husband" (Lichtheim's translation). The likeness to Proverbs 5 and 7 (the outsider woman, the husband away, deep water) is strong; it shows a shared tradition of instruction for young men in the ancient Near East, not that Proverbs copied Any.

God sees (5:21–23)

"The ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings" grounds the warning in God's knowledge, as Psalm 139 and Job 31:4 do. The wicked are caught "with the cords of his sins": the consequences of folly are built into the act. Verse 23 ends with a wordplay: the man who strays (shagah) in his folly is the opposite of the husband who "is ravished" (also shagah, vv. 19–20) by his wife's love: the same verb for intoxication and for going astray.

Later use

Hebrews 13:4 ("Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled") and 1 Corinthians 7:2–5 carry forward Proverbs' affirmation of marital love and warning against adultery. Rabbinic interpreters also read the "strange woman" allegorically as heresy or idolatry, a reading that later shaped some Christian commentary.