Proverbs 5:15–19

Proverbs 5:15 — "Drink water out of your own cistern" The opening imperative is at once simple and profound. In the arid landscape of ancient Israel, a cistern or well was not a luxury but a lifeline; water imagery throughout Proverbs and the broader wisdom tradition carries connotations of nourishment, life, and vitality. To be told to "drink from your own cistern" is to be told: the source of life is already yours — do not seek it elsewhere. The word "cistern" (Hebrew bôr) suggests something carefully hewn and maintained, a domestic resource tended with effort and care. The command thus implies that marriage is not a passive state but an active, cultivated reality. The spouse herself is this cistern — personal, particular, irreplaceable.

Proverbs 5:16 — "Should your springs overflow in the streets" This verse is grammatically interrogative or conditional in the Hebrew (literally, "Should your springs be scattered abroad?"), and most interpreters read it as a rhetorical question expecting a negative answer: Should your springs flow out into the streets, to be shared with strangers? No! The "springs" may refer to the generative vitality — including sexual energy and potentially the procreative gift — that belongs properly within the covenant of marriage. To scatter one's springs "in the streets" evokes the imagery of the adulteress who haunts the city's corners (Proverbs 7:12); the sage reverses that image here, warning the son not to let what is sacred and intimate spill into the public, anonymous, and degraded.

Proverbs 5:17 — "Let them be for yourself alone" The exclusivity of conjugal love is stated flatly: "for yourself alone, and not for strangers." The Hebrew word zārîm (strangers, foreigners) is the same root used throughout Proverbs for the "foreign woman" who seduces the young man. What belongs to the marriage covenant is not transferable. This exclusivity is not possessiveness but covenant fidelity — the same logic that underlies God's jealousy for Israel (Exodus 20:5). The intimacy of marriage creates a sacred boundary, a temenos, within which the fullness of self-gift is possible precisely because it is unreserved.

Proverbs 5:18 — "Let your spring be blessed" Here the rhetorical mood shifts from prohibition to beatitude. The sage does not merely say "do not stray" but "may your wife be a blessing to you." The Hebrew māqôr (spring, fountain) is a word used elsewhere of the source of life itself (Proverbs 10:11; 13:14). To call the wife a "blessed spring" is to situate her within the theology of divine gift: she is not merely a social institution but a grace, a source from which life flows. "Rejoice in the wife of your youth" — the verb (śāmaḥ) is one of deep, exuberant joy, not contentment or mere satisfaction.

Proverbs 5:19 — "A loving doe and a graceful deer" The erotic imagery reaches its most lyrical point here. The doe ('ayyelet) and the deer (ya'ălâ) are figures of gentle beauty, swiftness, and fertility in ancient Near Eastern poetry — they appear also in the Song of Songs (2:9; 8:14), where the beloved is likened to a gazelle. The sage is not squeamish about the physical dimension of marital love; the body of the wife is explicitly praised as a source of intoxicating delight ("let her breasts satisfy you at all times; be intoxicated always in her love," v. 19b). The word translated "intoxicated" (šāgâ) can mean to be captivated, even ravished — the same word used negatively of being led astray by sin. Here it is redeemed: the only proper "intoxication" is the love of one's spouse.

Typological and Spiritual Senses Patristic tradition, following Origen and later the medieval exegetes, read the bride of Proverbs and of the Song of Songs as a figure of the Church and of the soul's union with God. The faithful husband who drinks only from his own cistern images the soul that draws its spiritual nourishment from God alone, refusing the "strange waters" of idolatry and sin. The "blessed spring" of the faithful wife prefigures the living water Christ offers the Samaritan woman (John 4:10–14), who had sought love in five broken cisterns. In this light, verse 15 becomes a summons to the deepest fidelity: drink from the One who is the true source of life.

Catholic tradition brings a uniquely rich lens to these verses because it refuses to separate the goodness of the body from the goodness of the soul. The Catechism teaches that "sexuality... becomes personal and truly human when it is integrated into the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman" (CCC §2337). Proverbs 5:15–19 is a poetic enactment of precisely this truth: the joy commended here is not merely tolerated but celebrated as constitutive of the covenant.

Pope St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body is the most sustained modern Catholic commentary on passages like this one. His insight that the body "makes visible what is invisible" — that the spousal gift of self in the flesh images the very self-donation of God — illuminates why the sage uses such sensuous language without apology. The wife as "blessed spring" is not merely a social arrangement but a sign: her body communicates gift, life, and covenant in the language of creation itself.

St. Jerome, commenting on Proverbs, noted that the positive commands here (rejoice, be intoxicated, be blessed) demonstrate that the Law does not merely constrain but liberates the heart toward its proper end. St. John Chrysostom (Homilies on Ephesians) argued that a husband who truly delights in his own wife has no appetite for adultery — virtue here is not suppression but the proper ordering of desire toward its true object.

The Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et Spes (§49) echoes this passage directly: "This love is uniquely expressed and perfected through the marital act... it is a love which is total." The "springs" that must not be scattered in the streets are precisely this totality — the complete self-gift that cannot be fragmented without being destroyed.

Contemporary Catholics navigate a culture that simultaneously hypersexualizes the body and treats it as purely instrumental — two distortions Proverbs 5 resists from both sides. The sage's counsel is concretely countercultural: in an age of pornography, casual sex, and the commodification of intimacy, the image of the "blessed spring" challenges spouses to ask whether they are actually drinking from their own cistern — investing attention, tenderness, prayer, and physical presence in their marriage — or consuming counterfeit waters elsewhere.

Practically, these verses invite married Catholics to examine not only fidelity in the narrow sense but the quality of their erotic and emotional attentiveness to their spouse. Do they "rejoice in the wife (or husband) of their youth" — the actual person they married, with all that time has added to them? The passage also speaks to those preparing for marriage: chastity before marriage is not the repression of eros but its preservation, keeping the springs from being scattered so they may flow fully within the covenant. And for those in celibate life, the typological resonance is equally demanding: is God truly the cistern from which all spiritual nourishment is drawn?