This verse is the woe poem's single command, Proverbs 23:29–35.
Quick answer
The poem's one command, and it is aimed at the eyes: do not even gaze at the wine at its most beautiful, red, sparkling, swirling smooth. For the person the poem describes, the fight is lost or won at the looking.
Read the whole unit
Questions, answer, and now the only imperative in six verses. Everything after this verse is description: the bite, the visions, the sea. The poem legislates exactly once, here, at the point of the gaze.
Read the whole unit
The chapter's final saying is a six-part poem on drunkenness and the most artful treatment of addiction in ancient literature. It opens with six rapid-fire questions, who has woe, sorrow, contentions, complaints, causeless wounds, red eyes (v. 29), answers them in one line, those who linger long at the wine (v. 30), issues its single command, do not even look at the sparkle in the cup (v. 31), and then abandons commands entirely for description: the serpent's late bite (v. 32), the hallucinations and perverse speech (v. 33), the sensation of lying down in the sea, of sleeping at the top of a mast (v. 34), and finally the drunkard's own voice, beaten and numb and planning the next drink (v. 35). The poem never thunders. It lets the condition describe itself, and it closes without a verdict because the last sentence is the verdict.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the poem's strategy, and its honesty about beauty. The wine is genuinely lovely, and the poem says so with three clauses of admiration before the serpent appears in the next verse. No caricature, no pretense that the cup is ugly; the danger is precisely that it is not. And the command falls on the look, not the swallow, because the sages understood staging: for the one who lingers long, the swallow was decided during the gaze. Guard the earliest step and the later ones are never fought.
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.