What Does Proverbs 23:27 Mean?
For the harlot is a deep pit, and the strange woman is a narrow well.
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 a whore is a deep ditch; and a strange woman is a narrow pit.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 of Sheol.He brings me out into a broad place; he pulls me loose, because he delights in me.But I see another instruction in my limbs, warring against the one in my mind, and taking me captive to the instruction of falling short in my limbs.THE THREAD
From the narrow place I call out to the LORD, and the LORD answers me in a wide 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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