What Does Proverbs 23:27 Mean in the King James?
For a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “narrow” also names distress, so the pit is both a place that confines and a condition that closes in.
THE MEANING
This verse speaks now in an unsoftened image: a whore is a deep ditch, and a strange woman is a narrow pit. The reader is shown sexual involvement as both a descent and a tightening enclosure.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a sexual encounter can be harmless and leave the reader untouched is unsettled by the verse’s image of being drawn down and confined.
THE ROOT
צָרָה
tsarah
GROWS FROM
צָרַר
tsarar
To bind, press in, or be cramped.
Here צָרָה (tsarah) describes the pit as narrow; the same word also means distress. Spatial confinement and inner anguish belong to one word-family, so the image reaches beyond the pit to the state of being pressed in.
ALSO GROWS
tsar: Narrow or tight; also an adversary or foe.
צַר
The same root family links tightness with opposition, echoing the verse’s image of a way that closes around the person.
tsarah: Distress, trouble, or anguish.
צָרָה
The word used for the narrow pit also names distress, joining physical enclosure with the anguish it can produce.
metzar: A narrow place or distress.
מֵצַר
This form makes the root’s spatial sense plain: distress is pictured as being caught in a cramped place.
THE PATTERN
What draws a person downward and closes in is exposed as a trap, while deliverance opens a way into spaciousness.
Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.THE THREAD
I called upon the LORD in distress: the LORD answered me, and set me in a large place.The word translated “distress” is מֵצַר (metzar, a narrow place), from the same צרר (tsarar, press in) root family as Proverbs’ צָרָה (tsarah, narrow). The psalm moves from cramped space into a large place, opening the way out of the enclosure pictured here.
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