This verse closes the saying about drunkards and gluttons, Proverbs 23:19–21.
Quick answer
The saying's forecast: the consuming life consumes its own resources, and the stupor it produces, "drowsiness," ends by dressing a man in rags. This is the observed economics of excess, not a curse pronounced on struggling people.
Read the whole unit
The appeal asked for a steered heart, the command named the company to avoid, and this verse shows the destination: poverty arriving not as bad luck but as the compound interest of a lifestyle.
Read the whole unit
A three-verse saying against joining the party crowd, and the first of this chapter's two drinking texts. The structure is a father's appeal (v. 19), the command with its company named, winebibbers and gluttonous eaters (v. 20), and the economic forecast (v. 21): the drunkard and the glutton come to poverty, and drowsiness dresses a man in rags. The saying's concern is not pleasure but trajectory; it watches the table companions a young man chooses and reads his future in them. Its warning is sociological before it is moral: you become your banquets. The heavier, more compassionate treatment of drunkenness itself waits at 23:29–35; this saying does the earlier, preventive work of choosing company.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the mechanism, and it is quieter than expected: drowsiness. Not scandal, not catastrophe, just the slow heavy-liddedness of the overfed and overpoured life, in which work is missed, judgment dulls, and margins erode until the wardrobe itself testifies. The image of drowsiness "clothing" a man in rags is the saying's one picture, and it works by inversion: he did nothing, and that was the mechanism. Ruin, in this saying, is mostly something you sleep through.
Related: Proverbs 6:9–11 · Proverbs 21:17
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.