What Does Proverbs 27:15 Mean?
A constant dripping on a rainy day, and a woman of strife, are level.
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
A continual dropping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are alike.THE KEY
The verse shows how a home can be worn down by what never stops, even when each drop seems too small to matter.
THE MEANING
A contentious woman is compared to a leak that keeps dripping through a rainy day: the strain comes through repetition. This speaks now wherever recurring quarrels turn a place meant for shelter into a place of exposure.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie is that a quarrel is harmless because each one ends quickly; repeated contention can become the steady leak that wears down a home.
THE ROOT
דֶּלֶף
deleph
GROWS FROM
דלף
dalaph
to drip or leak, letting water fall drop by drop
“constant dripping” in this verse is deleph. The image is not one sudden flood but a leak that keeps finding its way in. The root makes persistence visible: the damage gathers through drops that seem small on their own.
ALSO GROWS
dalaph: to drip or leak
דָּלַף
The verb names the repeated action behind the proverb’s image.
dolef: dripping or leaking
דֹּלֵף
This participle presents the leak as ongoing, matching the verse’s unbroken recurrence.
מִדְיָנִים
midyanim
GROWS FROM
דין
din
to judge, plead, or contend
“contentious” in this verse is midyanim. The phrase describes a woman amid quarrels, bringing the conflict itself into focus. The word-family’s links to judging and pleading add the sense of claims continually pressing against one another.
ALSO GROWS
din: judgment or pleading
דִּין
This branch carries the sense of weighing or pressing a claim, a shape contention can take.
madon: strife or contention
מָדוֹן
This related noun names the quarrel itself, making the household strain a recurring condition rather than a single dispute.
THE PATTERN
Repeated, seemingly small disturbances can wear down a place meant to provide shelter.
A thick-headed son is the ruin of his father, and the strife of a wife is a dripping that does not stop.It is better to settle on the corner of a roof than in a house shared with a woman of strife.Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?THE THREAD
A thick-headed son is the ruin of his father, and the strife of a wife is a dripping that does not stop.This verse names the same pairing directly: a wife’s contentions are a continual drip. The shared דֶּלֶף (deleph, drip or leak) image makes the mechanism plain: recurring quarrels keep finding their way into the home.
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