What Does Proverbs 5:20 Mean?
And why do you reel, my son, with a stranger woman, and embrace the bosom of a foreign woman?
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 why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?THE KEY
The Hebrew word for “ravished” also describes being swept up in love one verse earlier, so the question is where desire carries you.
THE MEANING
The verse speaks to the moment desire turns you toward an intimacy marked as foreign. It asks what carries you there, because the same verb describes being swept up in love elsewhere in this chapter. The force of desire alone does not tell you whether it is carrying you toward love or off course.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that overwhelming attraction proves you have found the intimacy you need: here, that pull is named as straying when it turns toward a stranger.
THE ROOT
תִּשְׁגֶּה
tishgeh
GROWS FROM
שגה
shagah
To wander, go astray, or err; figuratively, to be swept away or carried off course.
“do you reel” in this verse is tishgeh. English “ravished” emphasizes intensity, while שגה (shagah) also carries the sense of wandering or losing direction. Proverbs uses the same verb for being swept up in love and for being carried toward a stranger, making the direction of desire the revealing difference.
ALSO GROWS
tishgeh: The same verb appears in Proverbs 5:19 in “be thou ravished always with her love.”
תִּשְׁגֶּה
It shows that the verb can describe being absorbed in love; verse 20 turns on where that same force is directed.
yishgeh: This form of the same root appears in Proverbs 5:23, where a person goes astray in folly.
יִשְׁגֶּה
The passage links the pull of verse 20 with the loss of direction named at its close.
THE PATTERN
A desire that draws a person away can feel compelling before its cost becomes visible.
With the multitude of her instruction she bends him; with the smoothings of her lips she pushes him.But each one is tested by his own craving, dragged out and lured.THE THREAD
Let her be a loving hind, and a favored mountain goat; let her breasts drench you at all times, and always reel in her love.The same Hebrew verb תִּשְׁגֶּה (tishgeh, be ravished or swept up) appears in both verses. The word holds the intensity steady while the object changes: love in verse 19, a stranger in verse 20.
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