Proverbs / Question
Proverbs 5:15–18 uses water and a cistern/well as a picture for marital faithfulness. It describes love as something kept within one’s own home rather than spread outside. The passage connects this with rejoicing in one’s wife.
In Proverbs 5:15–17 the teacher urges the listener to enjoy sexual and relational intimacy in its proper place, pictured as drinking water from one’s own secured source. The logic contrasts private, rightful enjoyment (“your own cistern…your own well”) with intimacy that spills into public space. These lines sit inside a longer warning against being drawn into an illicit relationship and then paying for it with loss, shame, and regret (the surrounding section speaks in vivid, bodily and economic images).
These lines use everyday water imagery—cistern, well, springs, streams—to portray desire being satisfied from a protected, rightful source (verse 15). The rhetorical question about water spilling into streets and public squares assumes the answer “no” (verse 16).
A common mistake is to turn the wording into a slogan. The better reading keeps the phrase tied to the passage, the speaker, and the problem the book is addressing.
Start with Proverbs 5:15-18, then read the surrounding section so the answer stays connected to the passage's flow.
15Drink water out of your own cistern, Running water out of your own well.
16Should your springs overflow in the streets, Streams of water in the public squares?
17Let them be for yourself alone, Not for strangers with you.
18Let your spring be blessed. Rejoice in the wife of your youth.