Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 5:15-20

Drink water from your own cistern,
And running water from your own well.
Should your fountains be dispersed abroad,
Streams of water in the streets?
Let them be only your own,
And not for strangers with you.
Let your fountain be blessed,
And rejoice with the wife of your youth.
As a loving deer and a graceful doe,
Let her breasts satisfy you at all times;
And always be enraptured with her love.
For why should you, my son, be enraptured by an immoral woman,
And be embraced in the arms of a seductress?

Proverbs 5:15-20 (NKJV).

Not even to Song of Solomon yet, but you can already get a sense for why he wrote that one too, right?

Solomon starts off comparing the resource of water to that of intimacy with one's wife, and this is not to make of her an inanimate object, but to emphasize the importance of the physical relationship between her and him, and the exclusivity of that relationship.

Water, especially in an arid environment, is precious. It is desirable, it is necessary to live and to thrive. While Solomon may not be intending to attach the entirety of that connotation to sexual intimacy between husband and wife, it would have been an analogy that people of that era would recognize immediately.

Modern technology has diluted the significance of this reference, with plumbing and city water supplies and each household not needing to tap its own water supply, but before the invention of modern plumbing systems, if you could not find a source of water on your property, you were in trouble.

Without access to water, you could not irrigate crops, provide water to your livestock, as well as have access to water for your family. You'd have to set up an arrangement with a neighbor, and that could get complicated fast. Realize that there weren't ways to transport large quantities of water over any great distance, so to feed a herd of cattle, you'd have to take the whole herd to the source of water. All the while, those creatures are grazing, and eating of the grass of your neighbor's fields while on the way to get water, thus reducing the amount of grass that they'd have for their own cattle, further entwining the relationship with your neighbor as they take their herds onto your lands in order to have sufficient access to food.

The reason I emphasize this is that water was necessary, important, and access to it was carefully guarded, carefully protected from those who would not appreciate it, take care of the water infrastructure, or perhaps even poison or taint it through foul play.

In the same sense of importance then Solomon emphasizes the physical relationship between the husband and wife. For the same reason that you wouldn't waste water by spilling it out into the street, you wouldn't just grant anyone access, nor would you try to gain access to someone else's water supply when you have your own, so should a husband find satisfaction only in his wife, and she only in him.

This is not just an intellectual love, a romantic or idealized emotional love either, but a physical one, which should be clear in that Solomon is literally saying to enjoy your wife's body, even after the youth has departed from both of you. The immoral woman may be more attractive, more desirable.

The water always seems cooler when drawn from someone else's well, right?

The problem is that the seductress is not interested in your future, only in leveraging your present desires to satisfy her current needs, or the needs of whomever has deployed her, and will not shed a single tear for the destruction you wreak upon your own family, your own legacy, your own future in pursuing her embrace.

Instead, care to and appreciate what you already have, because the "wife of your youth" is intimately invested in both you and your family. She cares deeply about the results of the decisions you make, and not just because of how she benefits from them, but because there is no way for her to benefit without lifting up the rest of the family as well.

In the modern world, through legal and social changes, this dynamic has been destroyed, almost entirely. No longer are women encouraged to seek the benefit of their entire household, only themselves, through the deception of their own emotional state supposedly acting as an accurate reflection of the reality of the family status. In turn, men are no longer able to enjoy the wives of their youth, who have been perverted by and fallen prey to demonic deceits, and so in response, in still desiring a helper, a companion who sacrifices of themselves, they turn to immoral women to satiate desire, but not to continue to grow their own legacy.

It's the pattern of The Garden, of The Fall, all over again. Eve is tempted to lust after that which she cannot, or at least should not, obtain, and as a reaction, Adam elects to pursue physical companionship and intimacy instead of obedience to God.

This is why Solomon states what he does about intimacy in marriage, not because there is nothing else important about the marriage dynamic, but because this is what can so easily destroy it, and has done so reliably since the dawn of human civilization. It's because of how frequent, how damaging, these acts are that they get so much emphasis.

Later in Proverbs, Solomon will discuss other details, other dynamics, but it's important not to miss the significance that in the first discussion of marriage dynamics, he emphasizes the need to avoid adultery, to appreciate what you have and not lust after what only appears desirable, but in fact leads to destruction.