This verse opens the saying about the stingy host, Proverbs 23:6–8.
Quick answer
Do not accept the hospitality of a man with an evil eye, the Hebrew idiom for the stingy and grudging. His food costs more than it appears to, because it is served with resentment attached.
Read the whole unit
The saying runs three verses: the warning (v. 6), the reason, his heart is not in his own invitation (v. 7), and the outcome, the meal you will wish you could give back (v. 8). It is the mirror image of 23:1–3: two tables, two hidden agendas.
Read the whole unit
The second meal scene in this chapter mirrors the first. At the ruler's table (23:1–3) the danger was leverage; at the miser's table it is falseness. The host presses food on you, "Eat and drink!", but the words and the heart run in opposite directions: he is counting every bite. The Hebrew behind verse 7's first line is genuinely difficult, but the scene's meaning is not: this is a portrait of hospitality without goodwill, generosity performed by a man whose inner accounting never stops. The saying's verdict is visceral: the morsel eaten at such a table will come back up, and your pleasant dinner conversation was wasted breath. The unit teaches discernment about invitations: what matters at any table is not what is served but what the host's heart is doing while you eat.
What this verse contributes
This verse identifies the host. "Miser" translates the idiom a man of evil eye, the opposite of the "generous eye" the book blesses at 22:9. The evil eye watches what it gives and begrudges it. The verse's wisdom is preventive: the time to discern a grudging host is before you sit down, because the same delicacies that were dangerous at the ruler's table for what they could buy are dangerous here for what they secretly cost.
Related: Proverbs 22:9 · Proverbs 26:24–25
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.