What Does Proverbs 5:17 Mean?
Let them be yours alone, and none for strangers with you.
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
Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee.THE KEY
What the KJV calls “thine own” is, in Hebrew, “to you alone”: the boundary is part of the intimacy itself.
THE MEANING
What is entrusted to you is held within a bond rather than made available to outsiders; its boundary is part of its shape. The verse names an intimacy whose belonging is exclusive in the present: it is yours alone, with no stranger alongside.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the idea that intimacy remains unchanged when shared indiscriminately; the verse treats the boundary as part of its meaning.
THE ROOT
לְבַדֶּךָ
levaddekha
GROWS FROM
בדד
בדד (badad): to be alone, apart, or in isolation.
“yours alone” in this verse is levaddekha. The phrase לְבַדֶּךָ means “to you alone,” carrying the root’s sense of apartness into the bond. English “own” can sound like possession; the Hebrew also makes the boundary explicit.
ALSO GROWS
badad: Alone, apart, or in isolation.
בָּדָד
This is the root in a basic form, making explicit the apartness carried by לְבַדֶּךָ.
mitboded: Withdrawing or isolating oneself.
מִתְבּוֹדֵד
This form shows the root describing a state of separation, not only something possessed as one’s own.
THE PATTERN
A covenant bond reserves intimacy within the union, and its boundary marks the bond’s integrity.
Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother, and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.A garden locked is my sister, my bride; a spring locked, a fountain sealed.So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What God has yoked together, let no one pull apart.THE THREAD
And Israel pitches his tent alone in trust, and the spring of Jacob is upon a land of grain and new wine, and his heavens also drip dew.בָּדָד (badad), “alone” or “apart,” is the same root behind לְבַדֶּךָ in this verse. Deuteronomy joins that apartness to dwelling “in safety,” opening the boundary here as protection around intimacy.
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