Proverbs 25:16–17

Proverbs 25:16–17 pairs two deceptively simple observations — that too much honey turns the stomach, and that too many visits wear out a welcome — to teach a single, demanding moral truth: every good thing has a threshold beyond which it becomes a harm. Together these verses form a compact meditation on the virtue of temperance as it governs appetite, pleasure, and the delicate fabric of human relationship. Within the larger wisdom tradition of Proverbs, they insist that the wise person is precisely the one who knows when to stop.

Verse 16 — "Have you found honey? Eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it."

The rhetorical question "Have you found honey?" invites the reader into a moment of discovery and delight. In the ancient Near East, honey was among the most prized of foods — wild honey was gathered at risk and effort, and its sweetness was a genuine luxury (cf. Ps 19:10). The sage does not say "do not eat honey." The finding is celebrated; the eating is permitted. What is regulated is the degree. The Hebrew root dayyekā ("enough for you") is personal and precise: this is not asceticism imposed from without but self-knowledge applied from within. The consequence of excess — pen tisba'ennû wahaqē'otāh, "lest you be sated with it and vomit it" — is viscerally physical. The sage chooses the most bodily of images deliberately: when appetite overrules reason, the body itself revolts. The good thing is not destroyed; the capacity to enjoy it is. Excess does not merely diminish pleasure — it converts it into its opposite, nausea. This is a precise account of how intemperance works: it does not satisfy, it satiates; and satiation, pushed past its limit, becomes revulsion.

Verse 17 — "Let your foot be seldom in your neighbor's house, lest he have his fill of you and hate you."

The parallelism with verse 16 is unmistakable and deliberate. The sage now transposes the honey metaphor onto the social register. The word translated "seldom" (hōqar, literally "make precious" or "make rare") implies that visits, like honey, acquire their value partly from their rarity. The neighbor's house is not a hostile space — it is a good to be enjoyed, a relationship to be cultivated. But the same principle governs: excess transforms a welcome into a burden. The shocking word at the end — śenē'ekā, "he will hate you" — is not hyperbole for effect but clinical honesty. The wise teacher does not soften the consequence. Overstaying, over-visiting, over-demanding of a neighbor's time and hospitality produces not mild annoyance but the corrosion of genuine affection. What began as friendship risks ending as resentment.

The structural wisdom of the pairing: The juxtaposition of honey and human presence is theologically significant. By placing appetite for a physical pleasure and appetite for human company in strict parallel, the sage treats both as goods ordered by reason. This is not a counsel of suspicion toward pleasure or toward neighbors — it is a counsel of wisdom that sees in both the same structural danger: the good thing devoured without restraint becomes its own undoing. The literary form — observation, imperative, motive clause — mirrors the Deuteronomic pattern of law, suggesting that these are not mere folk maxims but participate in an ordered vision of reality where human flourishing depends on the wise governance of desire.

Catholic tradition uniquely illuminates this passage through its fully developed theology of temperance as a cardinal virtue. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines temperance as "the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods" (CCC 1809). These verses from Proverbs enact precisely this definition: created goods (honey, neighborly company) are not condemned but ordered. Temperance, as Aquinas elaborates in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, qq. 141–170), is not the destruction of appetite but its perfection — the moderation that allows the good to remain a good.

St. John Cassian, in the Institutes and Conferences, treats intemperance not merely as a physical failing but as the root of spiritual disorder, observing that the monk who cannot govern his appetite for food will be unable to govern any other desire. St. Gregory the Great in the Moralia in Job identifies excessive sociability as a specific peril to the interior life, warning that the soul which squanders itself in company loses the capacity for recollection.

The Church Fathers were attentive to the honey image specifically. Origen (Homilies on Ezekiel) and later St. Bernard (Sermons on the Song of Songs, Sermon 1) both note that honey — a figure for Scripture and divine sweetness — must be received with reverent measure, not consumed with the voracity of one who would exhaust it. St. Bernard writes memorably: "If you are wise, you will show yourself a reservoir rather than a canal."

Pope Francis, in Laudato Si' (§§222–224), draws on the Thomistic virtue tradition to argue that temperance is not personal only but social and ecological: the same disordered appetite that sickens the individual corrodes the community and creation itself. These two verses from Proverbs — modest and practical as they appear — touch the nerve of that teaching.

For contemporary Catholics, these verses offer a counter-cultural wisdom that cuts across several familiar temptations of modern life. In an age of unlimited streaming, algorithmic abundance, and the frictionless consumption of every pleasure, verse 16 is almost a diagnostic: our digital and material culture is designed precisely to override the moment of "enough." The Catholic practice of fasting and abstinence — often misread as punitive — is in fact a training of exactly the capacity these verses commend: the ability to stop at the threshold, before satiation becomes nausea.

Verse 17 speaks with equal directness to the culture of constant availability fostered by social media. The compulsive need to be present, to comment, to check in, to overshare — these are a modern form of wearing out the neighbor's threshold. Catholic spiritual direction has always prized custody of one's presence as an extension of custody of the senses. Practically: examine whether your communication habits — texting, visiting, social media engagement — serve genuine relationship or reflect an anxiety that cannot bear to be alone. Cultivate the discipline of leaving people wanting more rather than wanting less. The neighbor you visit seldom will receive you with greater joy; the silence you keep will make your word more weighty.