What Does Proverbs 30:6 Mean?
Do not add to his words, lest he reprove you, and you be found a liar.
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
Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.THE KEY
When your added words are tested beside God’s, the mismatch exposes the human voice claiming divine authority.
THE MEANING
God’s words meet you as a boundary you cannot enlarge while still assigning the increase to him. When your addition is measured against what he says, correction exposes its source, and you are found false. The responsibility for those added words remains with the one who supplied them.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A faithful-sounding addition can borrow God’s authority without exposing its human source.
THE ROOT
תּוֹסֶף
tosef
GROWS FROM
יסף
Yasaph (יָסַף): to add, increase, or continue.
This is the same root behind the warning in Deuteronomy not to add to the word. The name Yosef carries the same seed, meaning “he adds,” making the human source of an addition visible.
ALSO GROWS
tosifu: “You shall add,” from the same root in Deuteronomy 4:2.
תֹסִפוּ
The matching verb links this warning to a repeated boundary around adding to God’s words.
Yosef: “He adds”; Genesis 30:24 connects the name with the request, “The LORD shall add to me another son.”
יוֹסֵף
The root appears in a name that identifies the one who adds, showing that an addition has a source.
וְנִכְזָבְתָּ
venikhzavta
GROWS FROM
כזב
Kazav (כָּזַב): to lie, prove false, deceive, or fail.
“Be found a liar” in this verse is venikhzavta. This root can describe both a person found false and waters that fail. The warning is concrete: added words can prove unable to sustain the truth they claim to carry.
ALSO GROWS
kazav: Falsehood or deceit; Psalm 4:2 uses it in “seek after leasing.”
כָּזָב
The root names falsehood as something actively sought, as well as the one exposed by it.
yikhzevu: “Fail”; Isaiah 58:11 describes spring waters “whose waters fail not.”
יִכְזְבוּ
The same root can describe unreliability, revealing that a false claim may fail to hold up when tested.
THE PATTERN
The received word is protected from distortion when additions are not passed off as part of it.
You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor shave anything away from it, that you may guard the commandments of the LORD your God which I command you.I bear witness to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this scroll. If anyone lays upon them, God will lay upon him the blows written in this scroll.THE THREAD
And the LORD shall lead you continually, and fill your living soul in the parched places, and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a drenched garden, and like a spring of water whose waters never fail.The Hebrew behind “fail not” comes from the same כזב (kazav) root rendered “be found a liar” here. Isaiah’s waters that do not fail open the warning further: an added claim can be exposed as words that will not hold.
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