What Does Proverbs 5:11 Mean?
And you groan at what comes behind you, when your flesh and what remains of you run out.
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 mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,THE KEY
The Hebrew for “consumed” also means “brought to completion,” so grief arrives when the body itself has reached its end.
THE MEANING
The grief arrives at the end, when the cost has reached flesh and body; regret here is bodily depletion, not only a thought. This warning speaks now of pleasure whose damage outlasts its moment and becomes visible only after strength is spent.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a choice’s cost ends when its pleasure ends is undone: the body can carry the consequence forward until the loss is felt too late.
THE ROOT
בִּכְלוֹת
bikhlōṯ
GROWS FROM
כ־ל־ה
To be finished or brought to completion; by extension, to be spent or consumed.
“run out” in this verse is bikhlōṯ. The verse places your “last” beside flesh and body being brought to their end. The root makes “consumed” carry both completion and depletion: the cost has reached the body itself.
ALSO GROWS
wayekhullu: Were finished, completed
וַיְכֻלּוּ
In Genesis 2:1, this root describes creation reaching completion; here it describes flesh spent to its end.
yikhlu: They are consumed, come to an end
יִכְלוּ
Job 4:9 uses this form for people being consumed, confirming the stark finality carried by the root.
וְנָהַמְתָּ
wənāhamtā
GROWS FROM
נ־ה־ם
To roar, growl, or groan.
The English “mourn” can sound like silent sorrow, while this verb carries the sound of a roar or groan. The grief becomes audible at the point of bodily depletion.
ALSO GROWS
nōhēm: Roaring
נֹהֵם
Proverbs 28:15 uses this form for a roaring lion, giving the verse’s “mourn” a rough, voiced sound.
nāham: To roar or groan
נָהַם
This verbal form names the action behind “mourn”: the end is met with an audible groan, not only inward sadness.
THE PATTERN
A desire can conceal its cost while it is being pursued, but its consequences mature and overtake the one pursuing it.
His own crookednesses catch the wicked, and he is held by the cords of his falling short.For the one who sows into his own flesh reaps decay from the flesh, but the one who sows into the breath reaps from the breath the life of the ages.Then craving, when it has conceived, gives birth to falling short; and falling short, when it is full-grown, bears death.THE THREAD
By the breath of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils they are spent.Both passages use כָּלָה (kalah, to be finished or consumed) for an ending that exhausts the person. Job speaks of people being consumed; Proverbs makes that same finality specific to flesh and body.
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