What Does Proverbs 23:4 Mean?
Do not toil to grow rich; let go of your own discernment.
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
Labour not to be rich: cease from thine own wisdom.THE KEY
The word for labor already carries weariness, exposing the cost inside the effort to become rich.
THE MEANING
This verse meets you where wealth feels like something your effort and calculation must secure. It names that pursuit as tiring and places a limit on the belief that your own understanding can guarantee its outcome. The warning falls on the striving and self-reliance; it does not call riches themselves evil.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
More effort and sharper personal judgment can guarantee lasting security.
THE ROOT
תִּיגַע
tigaʿ
GROWS FROM
יגע
y-g-ʿ
To toil and grow weary.
“toil” in this verse is tigaʿ. The Hebrew root holds exertion and weariness together. The verse exposes the fatigue inside making wealth a goal that must be forced into being.
ALSO GROWS
yāgaʿ: To toil; to grow weary.
יָגַע
The verb carries both the effort and its cost.
yegīʿāh: Labor; toil.
יְגִיעָה
This noun names the exertion that the verse warns can consume the person pursuing riches.
yāgēaʿ: Weary; exhausted.
יָגֵעַ
This branch makes visible what the English word “labour” can leave implicit: the seeker may end up worn down.
לְהַעֲשִׁיר
lehaʿashir
GROWS FROM
עשר
ʿ-sh-r
To become rich; to have wealth.
The Hebrew frames riches as a becoming-rich project, not only as a possession. Proverbs 10:22 uses this same root for the LORD’s blessing that makes rich, so the warning concerns toil as a way of securing wealth, not wealth itself.
ALSO GROWS
ʿosher: Wealth; riches.
עֹשֶׁר
This noun names the result the verse says not to exhaust yourself pursuing.
ʿashir: Rich; wealthy.
עָשִׁיר
This form describes the person who has reached the condition the verse names as a goal.
מִבִּינָתְךָ
mibinatkha
GROWS FROM
בין
b-y-n
To discern, distinguish, or understand.
The word translated “wisdom” is binah, the capacity to discern; the same root appears in bein, “between.” The verse exposes the limit of treating your own distinctions and calculations as a guarantee of wealth.
ALSO GROWS
bein: Between; among.
בֵּין
The shared root links discernment with recognizing distinctions between things.
tevunah: Understanding; insight.
תְּבוּנָה
This related form shows the same discerning faculty that the verse marks as your own.
THE PATTERN
A life organized around accumulating wealth cannot secure the lasting satisfaction or rest it seeks.
It is emptiness for you to rise up early and sit up late, to eat the bread of pains; for so he gives his beloved sleep.The lover of silver is not filled with silver, and the lover of the crowd is not filled with the harvest. This too is vapor.Do not store up for yourselves treasures upon the ground, where moth and rust gnaw them out of sight, and where thieves dig through and steal.THE THREAD
The blessing of the LORD makes rich, and he adds no pain with it.“Maketh rich” uses the same Hebrew root, עשר (ʿ-sh-r), as “to be rich” here. That echo opens the verse as a warning about wealth pursued through self-exhausting effort, rather than a claim that riches themselves are evil.
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