This verse sits inside the mother's counsel, Proverbs 31:1–9, and belongs with verse 7.
Quick answer
A sharp pivot: strong drink belongs, if anywhere, with the perishing and the bitter of heart, not in the palace. The line reads as pointed contrast, wine as last mercy for the dying rather than recreation for the deciding.
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 counsel's most debated turn, and honesty about its tone serves the reader: interpreters have heard everything here from literal compassion, wine as the ancient world's palliative for the dying, to a queen mother's cutting irony aimed at her son. What is not debated is the contrast the line draws. Strong drink dulls, and dulling is the last thing a judge needs and possibly the only relief a perishing man has left. The verse hands the cup down the social ladder, away from the throne, and in doing so it defines the throne by what it must stay awake for.
Related: Proverbs 31:4–5 · Matthew 27:34
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.