Proverbs5chapter 5

The chapter's central picture is water rights. Judah gets no rain from May to September, so a household cut a cistern in the rock under or beside the house, plastered it, and fed it from the roof through a channel. That water was private property, guarded, and rationed. "Drink waters out of thine own cistern" is not poetry to people who lived that way; it is the difference between having water and begging for it.

"Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad" turns the picture around — water running out into the street is water wasted, spilled where anyone can take it. In a dry country that image carried real disgust.

The consequences named are legal and financial, not only moral. An adulterer could lose his "honour" and his "years unto the cruel" — the wronged husband and his clan had standing to pursue him, the Law made adultery a capital matter, and a settlement could strip a man's estate and hand "thy labours" to a stranger's house.

"Her lips drop as an honeycomb" and "her end is bitter as wormwood" pair the sweetest and the bitterest things in the local pantry. Wild honey was the region's only concentrated sweetener; wormwood was a scrubby desert plant so bitter it became the standard word for what poisons a good thing.