This verse sits inside the woe poem, Proverbs 23:29–35.
Quick answer
The poem's strangest picture: the drunkard is like a man lying down in the open sea, or asleep at the top of a ship's mast, everything pitching, nothing steady, danger on all sides and him unconscious of it. The verse renders the untethered feeling from inside.
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The descriptions have moved inward, from the bite to the visions to this: total loss of bearings. The colon at the verse's end hands the poem to the drunkard himself for its final word.
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 rendering of helplessness, and it does so from inside the experience. A man in the midst of the sea has nothing under him; a man atop the mast sways with every swell, the least stable point on the whole vessel, and he is lying down there, asleep in the one place no sailor would close his eyes. The image captures what makes the condition so dangerous: not just instability but obliviousness to it, peril paired with the inability to perceive peril. It is the last thing the poem says about the drunkard before letting him speak, and it explains the numbness of what he is about to say.
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.