What Does Proverbs 5:15 Mean?
Drink waters from your own cistern, and flowing waters from the midst of your well.
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
Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.THE KEY
Fidelity gives desire a source from which it can flow abundantly.
THE MEANING
Your own cistern and well picture desire with a faithful, intimate source. The water is moving and abundant, so belonging is not pictured as deprivation; it is where desire can flow freely. The verse speaks now wherever intimacy is shaped by fidelity.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that fidelity makes desire dry or lifeless is undone by the image of running waters.
THE ROOT
נֹזְלִים
nozelim
GROWS FROM
נזל
nazal
To flow, drip, or run as liquid.
The Hebrew word נֹזְלִים (nozelim, flowing waters) comes from נזל (nazal, to flow): the image is water actively moving from a source. This root makes the verse’s abundance a continuing flow from the reader’s own well.
ALSO GROWS
nazal: To flow, drip, or stream.
נָזַל
The verb gives the verse its action: water reaches the reader as movement, not a fixed possession.
nozel: Flowing; liquid.
נוֹזֵל
This form names what is in motion, echoing the verse’s flowing waters drawn from within the well.
THE PATTERN
Scripture portrays intimate desire as life-giving when it flows within mutual, faithful belonging.
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth.A spring of gardens, a well of living waters, and dripping streams from Lebanon.Let the husband give to the wife what is owed in goodwill, and likewise the wife to the husband.THE THREAD
A spring of gardens, a well of living waters, and dripping streams from Lebanon.Song of Solomon uses the same Hebrew root נזל (nazal, to flow) for “streams.” Proverbs locates the flow in one’s own well; the Song imagines it pouring through a beloved garden, making intimacy a source of living water.
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