This verse closes the saying about the stingy host, Proverbs 23:6–8.
Quick answer
The meal at the grudging table ends in revulsion: the food comes back up, and the kind conversation you invested in the evening turns out to have been spent on a man who was never at the table with you. The saying closes on the sour aftertaste of false hospitality.
Read the whole unit
The three-verse scene has moved from warning (v. 6) to diagnosis (v. 7) to outcome. Verse 8 is the morning after.
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 delivers the saying's physical verdict. Vomiting is the body refusing what it took in, and the sages chose the image deliberately: hospitality with resentment in it is nourishment your soul cannot keep down. The second line grieves the smaller loss inside the larger one, the "pleasant words" wasted, the warmth you offered a heart that was busy counting. The saying ends with a table you leave emptier than you came.
Related: Proverbs 25:16 · Proverbs 15:17
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.