What Does Proverbs 5:10 Mean?
Lest strangers be filled with your strength, and your toil be in the house of a foreigner.
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
Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger;THE KEY
The verse names labor as pain already spent, and warns that its fruit can fill people outside your household.
THE MEANING
Your strength and toil become provision, and this verse shows them satisfying people beyond your household while your work lands in a stranger’s house. The word for labor carries the shade of pain: what changes hands is more than an abstract sum.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that wealth is detached from the strength and pain spent to produce it.
THE ROOT
וַעֲצָבֶיךָ
vaʿatsavekha
GROWS FROM
ע־צ־ב
A root associated with hurt and grief; its word family also names toil and pain.
“your toil” in this verse is vaʿatsavekha. English makes “labours” sound like neutral effort, but the Hebrew word belongs to a family that carries pain and sorrow too. The verse pictures not just wealth changing hands, but toil with its cost flowing into another house.
ALSO GROWS
ʿetsev: Toil, labor, pain
עֶצֶב
This noun shares the verse’s root and makes the cost within “labours” audible.
ʿitsavon: Painful toil, sorrow
עִצָּבוֹן
This related form joins work to sorrow, underscoring what is spent when one’s labor supports another household.
יִשְׂבְּעוּ
yisbeʿu
GROWS FROM
שׂ־ב־ע
To be sated, to have one’s fill.
“be filled” in this verse is yisbeʿu. The strangers are not merely receiving something; the Hebrew says they are satisfied by it. Their fullness comes from the strength and toil named in the same verse.
ALSO GROWS
śovaʿ: Fullness, satiety
שֹׂבַע
This noun names the condition the strangers reach: having enough, being filled.
hisbiaʿ: To satisfy, give one’s fill
הִשְׂבִּיעַ
This related verb shows the root’s active sense of making someone full, as the reader’s resources do here.
THE PATTERN
What one person accumulates through labor can become another person’s provision.
Surely every man walks in a shadow. Surely for vapor they roar. He heaps up, and does not perceive who will gather them.And I hated all my toil that I toiled under the sun, for I will set it down for the person who will be after me.But God said to him, Mindless one, this night your living soul will be demanded back from you. Then whose will those things be that you have made ready?THE THREAD
In all toil there is a remainder, but the word of the lips only bends toward lack.The Hebrew word translated “labour” here comes from the same root ע־צ־ב (ʿ-ṣ-b) as the toil in Proverbs 5:10. Here that toil yields profit; in Proverbs 5:10, its destination is another person’s house.
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