What Does Proverbs 5:10 Mean in the King James?
Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger;
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 verse names labor as pain already spent, and warns that its fruit can fill people outside your household.
THE MEANING
Your strength and toil become provision, and this verse shows them satisfying people beyond your household while your work lands in a stranger’s house. The word for labor carries the shade of pain: what changes hands is more than an abstract sum.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that wealth is detached from the strength and pain spent to produce it.
THE ROOT
וַעֲצָבֶיךָ
vaʿatsavekha
GROWS FROM
ע־צ־ב
A root associated with hurt and grief; its word family also names toil and pain.
English makes “labours” sound like neutral effort, but the Hebrew word belongs to a family that carries pain and sorrow too. The verse pictures not just wealth changing hands, but toil with its cost flowing into another house.
ALSO GROWS
ʿetsev: Toil, labor, pain
עֶצֶב
This noun shares the verse’s root and makes the cost within “labours” audible.
ʿitsavon: Painful toil, sorrow
עִצָּבוֹן
This related form joins work to sorrow, underscoring what is spent when one’s labor supports another household.
יִשְׂבְּעוּ
yisbeʿu
GROWS FROM
שׂ־ב־ע
To be sated, to have one’s fill.
“filled” in this verse is yisbeʿu. The strangers are not merely receiving something; the Hebrew says they are satisfied by it. Their fullness comes from the strength and toil named in the same verse.
ALSO GROWS
śovaʿ: Fullness, satiety
שֹׂבַע
This noun names the condition the strangers reach: having enough, being filled.
hisbiaʿ: To satisfy, give one’s fill
הִשְׂבִּיעַ
This related verb shows the root’s active sense of making someone full, as the reader’s resources do here.
THE PATTERN
What one person accumulates through labor can become another person’s provision.
Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me.But God said unto him, Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee: then whose shall those things be, which thou hast provided?THE THREAD
In all labour there is profit: but the talk of the lips tendeth only to penury.The Hebrew word translated “labour” here comes from the same root ע־צ־ב (ʿ-ṣ-b) as the toil in Proverbs 5:10. Here that toil yields profit; in Proverbs 5:10, its destination is another person’s house.
This reading is from Selah Verse.
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