What Does Proverbs 25:16 Mean?
Have you found honey? Eat what is enough for you, lest you be filled with it and vomit it up.
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
Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it.THE KEY
The warning is not against sweetness: beyond its measure, sweetness becomes what the body rejects.
THE MEANING
You can receive something sweet and welcome without taking all of it. The verse names the point where enjoyment becomes bodily refusal: what exceeds your enough is expelled. Its warning is about measure, not sweetness.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that if something is good, taking more of it can only make it better.
THE ROOT
תִּשְׂבָּעֶנּוּ
tisbaʿennu
GROWS FROM
שׂבע
s-b-ʿ
To be sated or satisfied; to have one’s fill.
“filled with it” in this verse is tisbaʿennu. The verb translated “filled” means to be satisfied or sated. The verse’s danger lies in passing from receiving honey to a satiety so complete that what was received is rejected.
ALSO GROWS
sāvēaʿ: Sated, satisfied.
שָׂבֵעַ
It shows that the verse’s “filled” is about reaching satisfaction, not merely making room for more.
sōvaʿ: Satiety, being full.
שֹׂבַע
This noun makes the threshold visible: the experience of enough has a limit.
אֱכֹל
ʾĕḵōl
GROWS FROM
אכל
ʾ-k-l
To eat, consume.
“eat” in this verse is ʾĕḵōl. Hebrew keeps the verb for eating and nouns for food in one root family. The sentence makes intake the hinge: honey moves from something welcomed into the body to something the body forces back out.
ALSO GROWS
ʾōḵel: Food.
אֹכֶל
The shared root ties the act of eating to what is eaten.
maʾăḵāl: Food, something eaten.
מַאֲכָל
It echoes the verse’s movement from taking honey in to the body’s rejection of too much.
THE PATTERN
What is taken beyond its fitting measure can become a source of loss or control.
It is not good to eat much honey, and to search out their weight is not weight.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.All things stand open to me, but not all things bring together. All things stand open to me, but I will not be brought under the power of anyone.THE THREAD
The morsel you have eaten, you vomit out, and you spoil your sweet words.This verse repeats the Hebrew verb וַהֲקֵאתוֹ (wa-haqēʾtô), from קיא (q-y-ʾ), meaning “vomit, expel.” It extends the physical reversal of taking something in to the loss of “sweet words.”
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