What Does Proverbs 5:18 Mean?
Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth.
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 thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.THE KEY
The fountain is the body’s generative source, and this verse blesses that source by joining it to joy with the wife of your youth.
THE MEANING
Your bodily desire and your delight with your wife belong together as part of a blessed life. The verse speaks of intimate joy as something alive within marriage.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that familiarity drains desire of joy, or that delight must be sought outside the marriage. Here, rejoicing with the wife of your youth remains a living possibility.
THE ROOT
מְקוֹרְךָ
maqorkha
GROWS FROM
קוּר
qûr
To dig or hollow out; the derived noun names a spring or source.
The Hebrew word is concrete: a source that wells up, rather than abundance in the abstract. The same word names the “fountain of living waters” in Jeremiah 2:13; here, in a passage about marital intimacy, it evokes the body’s generative source.
ALSO GROWS
maqor: A spring, fountain, or source.
מָקוֹר
This is the word used for “fountain” here, carrying the image of a wellspring of bodily life.
meqor mayim chayyim: A fountain or source of fresh, living water.
מְקוֹר מַיִם חַיִּים
Jeremiah 2:13 uses this phrase for a life-giving source, showing how maqor can carry the sense of life flowing from within.
בָּרוּךְ
barukh
GROWS FROM
בָּרַךְ
barak
To bless; its Hebrew word family includes a term for the knee.
“blessed” in this verse is barukh. The related word for “knee” gives blessing a bodily resonance of bowing or receiving. Here, the body’s generative life and marital delight stand within blessing, held as something worthy of honor.
ALSO GROWS
berekh: Knee.
בֶּרֶךְ
This related word gives the blessing a bodily image of bending or receiving.
berakhah: Blessing or benediction.
בְּרָכָה
This noun shares the root and names the blessing placed over the fountain.
וּשְׂמַח
wesamach
GROWS FROM
שָׂמַח
samach
To be glad or rejoice.
“rejoice” in this verse is wesamach. The verse names active gladness with a wife, not merely the fact of being married. The same root gives both the verb for rejoicing and the noun for joy, keeping delight at the center of the relationship.
ALSO GROWS
simchah: Joy or gladness.
שִׂמְחָה
The noun makes explicit the delight contained in the command to rejoice.
sameach: Glad, joyful.
שָׂמֵחַ
This form describes a person marked by the gladness the verse names.
THE PATTERN
Scripture holds marital intimacy as a protected, reciprocal bond of embodied delight.
A garden locked is my sister, my bride; a spring locked, a fountain sealed.See life with the woman you love, all the days of the life of your vapor, which he gives you under the sun, all the days of your vapor. For this is your portion in your living, and in the toil you toil under the sun.Let the husband give to the wife what is owed in goodwill, and likewise the wife to the husband.THE THREAD
When a man takes a new wife, he does not go out to war, and no matter passes over him. He is free at home one year, and he gladdens the wife he has taken.The Hebrew verb behind “cheer up” comes from שָׂמַח (samach, rejoice), the same root as “rejoice” in Proverbs 5:18. One verse names joy shared with a wife; the other describes a husband bringing joy to his wife, opening the root toward mutual gladness.
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