What Does Proverbs 5:9 Mean?
Lest you give your splendor to others, and your years to the cruel.
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
Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel:THE KEY
The warning calls the loss a transfer: honor and years are not merely diminished, but given into another’s hands.
THE MEANING
The verse names a costly transfer happening now: a person’s honor and years can be placed in the keeping of others, including the cruel. The danger reaches beyond reputation into the recurring seasons of a life and who gets to consume them.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that a destructive sexual attachment costs only embarrassment; the verse names a deeper loss, with years placed under the power of the cruel.
THE ROOT
תִּתֵּן
titten
GROWS FROM
נתן
n-t-n
Give, set, place.
“give” in this verse is titten. The verse does not only describe honor and years vanishing: its verb says they are given over. The same root carries the sense of setting or placing something, so the warning describes a transfer of what shapes a life.
ALSO GROWS
mattanah: gift
מַתָּנָה
A gift is something given from one hand to another, making the transfer inside this verse more visible.
nathun: given, set, placed
נָתוּן
This form shows what has been handed over as something placed in another’s keeping.
שְׁנֹתֶיךָ
shenotekha
GROWS FROM
שנה
sh-n-h
Repeat, do again; the word for a year is linked with a recurring cycle.
The Hebrew word for years carries an echo of repetition: time comes around in recurring seasons. The verse warns that these repeated turns of a life can be handed into cruel hands.
ALSO GROWS
shanah: year
שָׁנָה
A year is a recurring turn of time, giving “years” a sense of repeated seasons, not only elapsed duration.
shanah: repeat, do again
שָׁנָה
The verb makes the cycle inside the word for a year audible.
sheni: second
שֵׁנִי
The ordinal carries the sense of what comes again in a sequence.
THE PATTERN
What a person yields to a bond can become the power through which that bond takes hold of the person’s life.
That he laid open to her all his heart, and said to her, No blade has come up upon my head, for I have been set apart unto God from my mother's womb. If I am shaved, then my strength will turn aside from me, and I will become weak, and be like any other man.Do you not know that to the one you set yourselves beside as servants for hearing and response, his servants you are, the one you hear and respond to; whether of falling short unto death, or of hearing and response unto alignment?Flee the selling of bodies. Every shortcoming that a person does is outside the body; but the one who sells bodies misses the mark against his own body.THE THREAD
For by me your days multiply, and years of life are added to you.Both verses use שָׁנָה (shanah, “year”), with the word carrying the sense of recurring cycles. Proverbs 5:9 shows those cycles placed at cruelty’s disposal; Proverbs 9:11 shows wisdom increasing them.
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