What Does Proverbs 31:1 Mean?
The words of King Lemuel, the burden his mother straightens into him.
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
The words of king Lemuel, the prophecy that his mother taught him.THE KEY
The king’s words carry a weight his mother first placed on him: authority here is received before it is spoken.
THE MEANING
Lemuel (לְמוּאֵל, Lemuel, “for God”) bears a name that points beyond himself. His words are called a burden or oracle, and his mother’s instruction is part of what gives them shape and weight.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that power makes you self-originating: this king’s words are named as something his mother taught him.
THE ROOT
מַשָּׂא
massa burden or
GROWS FROM
נשא
Lift, carry, bear.
The word rendered “prophecy” also carries the sense of a burden: something borne. The verse lets the king’s words be both an utterance and a weight, formed through instruction before they are voiced.
ALSO GROWS
nasa: To lift, carry, or bear.
נָשָׂא
This root gives the oracle its image of something carried, not merely spoken.
massa: A burden or oracle.
מַשָּׂא
The same word holds the weight of what is carried and the utterance that bears it.
יִסְּרַתּוּ
yisserato she instructed
GROWS FROM
יסר
Instruct, discipline, correct.
“straightens into” in this verse is yisserato she instructed. The verb translated “taught” carries the sense of formative instruction that can also correct and restrain. The king’s words are shaped by more than information: they come through teaching that forms the person who speaks.
ALSO GROWS
musar: Instruction or discipline.
מוּסָר
This noun names the kind of formative teaching carried by the verb in this verse.
yeyasser: To discipline or instruct.
יְיַסֵּר
This verb shows that instruction in this root can shape through correction as well as teaching.
THE PATTERN
Wisdom that can bear public authority is formed first through close instruction.
Hear and respond, my son, to the straightening of your father, and do not let go of your mother's instruction.And these words, which I command you this day, shall be in your heart. And you shall sharpen them to your children, and speak of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk along the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.But you, remain in what you learned and were made firm in, knowing from whom you learned them. And that from the cradle you have known the set-apart letters, which are able to make you wise unto deliverance through trust in Jesus, the Anointed One.THE THREAD
To know wisdom and straightening, to discern the words of distinction.“Instruction” here is מוּסָר (musar, instruction or discipline), from the same root יסר (y-s-r, instruct or correct) as “taught” in Proverbs 31:1. The mother’s teaching is the formative instruction Proverbs names as part of perceiving wisdom.
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