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Proverbs › Chapter 25 › Proverbs 25:16

What Does Proverbs 25:16 Mean?

Have you found honey?Eat only as much as you need,Lest you be filled with it and vomit.Proverbs 25:16 · NKJV

Read with verse 27, which returns to the honey and turns it toward something else.

Quick answer

Good things have a quantity. The verse says it about honey and makes the consequence unpleasant enough to remember.

Read both lines

The saying opens with a question, which is rare, and the question grants the premise: you found honey, and honey is good. Chapter 24 told a son to eat it because it is good. Nothing here retracts that.

What this verse adds is a limit, and the limit is set by need rather than by appetite or by rule. Eat your fill is the Hebrew, meaning enough for you, which is a different measure for different people and different days. Then the third line supplies the enforcement, and it is deliberately undignified. Not a punishment and not a moral consequence: simply the body's response to too much of a legitimately good thing. The saying does not moralize because it does not have to.

Related: Proverbs 25:27 · Proverbs 24:13–14 · Proverbs 27:7 · Proverbs 30:8–9

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.