This verse sits inside the mother's counsel, Proverbs 31:1–9.
Quick answer
The first danger: spending royal strength in the harem until nothing is left for the throne. A mother warns her son against the indulgence that has quietly ended more kings than battle has.
Read the whole unit
The book's last chapter opens with a unique voice: the words of King Lemuel, "the utterance which his mother taught him." Lemuel appears nowhere else in Scripture, and the counsel he carries is the only teaching in Proverbs explicitly credited to a woman. Its structure is a queen mother's brief: the triple address of maternal urgency (v. 2), then three dangers ranked by what they cost a king: women who consume royal strength (v. 3), wine that clouds royal judgment (vv. 4–5, with a sharp aside on where strong drink might mercifully go instead, vv. 6–7), and finally the positive charge that everything was protecting: open your mouth for the speechless, judge righteously, plead the cause of the poor and needy (vv. 8–9). The logic runs on vocation. A king's strength, clarity, and voice are not his own; they are held in trust for people who have none of the three. The unit ends, and the acrostic begins, and the book closes with the counsel of a mother followed by the praise of a woman, wisdom's last two teachers both unexpected and both unforgettable.
What this verse contributes
This verse contributes the first of the counsel's three dangers, and history stood behind the mother as she spoke: Israel's own golden king was famously bent by his many wives (1 Kings 11:1–4), and the law of kings had warned against multiplying them long before (Deuteronomy 17:17). The warning is not misogyny, and the chapter itself is the proof: it was composed or carried by a woman and ends in twenty-two verses of praise for one. The target is the indulgent squandering of a ruler's strength, "that which destroys kings," appetite as a court's quiet assassin. The mother is not warning her son away from women; she is warning him away from waste, because vv. 8–9 will show what his strength is actually for.
Related: Deuteronomy 17:17 · 1 Kings 11:1–4 · Proverbs 5:9–11
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.