What Does Proverbs 2:18 Mean?
For her house bows down toward death, and her tracks lead to the dead.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead.THE KEY
The verse makes death visible before arrival: in the house’s downward lean and the tracks her paths have worn.
THE MEANING
You are shown a whole dwelling already leaning toward death, with paths that lead among the departed. The destination is present in the direction of the house and in the course its paths trace.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a deadly ending arrives without warning: here, the house already leans toward it and the paths already lead there.
THE ROOT
מַעְגְּלֹתֶיהָ
maʿgeloteha
GROWS FROM
עגל
ʿ-g-l
Roundness or circuit; מַעְגָּל is a track or course.
“tracks” in this verse is maʿgeloteha. The word for her paths carries the sense of a track or course, with a connection to circling. Her paths read as established routes, and their destination is already visible.
ALSO GROWS
maʿgāl: Track, course, or path
מַעְגָּל
This is the singular form behind “paths,” giving the image the sense of a traced course.
ʿāgōl: Round
עָגֹל
Its circular sense echoes in the path word’s circuit imagery.
מָוֶת
māwet
GROWS FROM
מות
m-w-t
To die; death as the event or outcome of dying.
The noun מָוֶת and the verb מוּת belong to one word-family: the destination named here shares its seed with the act of dying. Death is not detached from the path; it is the outcome toward which the path moves.
ALSO GROWS
mût: To die
מוּת
The verb and the noun share one root, joining the movement of dying to the destination called death.
môt tâmût: “Thou shalt surely die”
מוֹת תָּמוּת
The repeated root in Genesis 2:17 makes the same seed audible in a declaration of death.
THE PATTERN
The course of a life makes its destination visible before it arrives.
Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold of Sheol.Then craving, when it has conceived, gives birth to falling short; and falling short, when it is full-grown, bears death.Enter through the narrow gate, for wide is the gate, and roomy is the way that leads to perishing, and many are those who go in through it.THE THREAD
But from the tree of knowing good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.Both verses carry מות (m-w-t): Proverbs names death as the direction of a house and its paths, while Genesis repeats the root in “thou shalt surely die.” The shared seed connects the destination with the act of dying.
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