What Does Proverbs 27:27 Mean?
And goats' milk is enough for your bread, for the food of your house, and for the living of your maidens.
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
And thou shalt have goats’ milk enough for thy food, for the food of thy household, and for the maintenance for thy maidens.THE KEY
The verse calls a household provided for when its nourishment reaches everyone whose life depends on it.
THE MEANING
The provision here is concrete and shared: nourishment reaches your table, your household, and the maidens in it. Its measure is the life it sustains across the whole household.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that only surplus counts as abundance: enough is already abundance when it sustains the lives connected to your table.
THE ROOT
חַיִּים
chayyim
GROWS FROM
חיה
ch-y-h
to live, be alive
The word rendered “maintenance” also carries the concrete sense of “life,” tying the maidens’ support to living itself. The same root names both being alive and living, so provision appears as the continuation of life through the household.
ALSO GROWS
chay: alive, living
חַי
This branch names the state that the household’s food and milk sustain.
chayah: to live, remain alive
חָיָה
This verb shows the root as ongoing life, the very thing the provision supports.
THE PATTERN
Provision is complete when nourishment reaches all who depend on a household.
THE THREAD
For with you is the spring of life; in your light we see light.The Hebrew word חַיִּים (chayyim), “life,” in Proverbs 27:27 appears again in Psalm 36:9. Proverbs locates that life in nourishment shared through a household; Psalm calls it a fountain whose source is God.
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