This verse sits inside the father's lecture on the two paths, Proverbs 4:10–19.
Quick answer
Wickedness has become their food and violence their drink: not occasional indulgences but the daily table, the thing they live on.
Read the whole unit
The father's lecture on the two paths is built on the book's oldest picture: two roads. It opens on the good one (vv. 10–13): the father has taught and led, the path is right, and its traffic moves well. Steps are not hindered at a walk, and even at a run the traveler does not stumble; the only instruction is to grip what makes it so: "take firm hold of instruction... she is your life." Then the lecture crosses to the other road (vv. 14–17), and the commands pile up with almost comic urgency, five verbs in two verses: do not enter, do not walk, avoid, do not travel, turn away, pass on. The reason for the urgency is the traffic on that road. The wicked here are not casual sinners but people whose appetites have inverted: they cannot sleep until they have done evil, and wrongdoing has become their food and drink, bread of wickedness, wine of violence. The lecture closes with the two roads at full contrast (vv. 18–19): the path of the just is dawn light growing to full day, while the way of the wicked is darkness so total they never learn what keeps tripping them. The lecture's counsel is not resistance but distance. Nobody is asked to fight the dark road, only to stay off it, because paths, unlike moments, have destinations built in.
What this verse contributes
This verse finishes the portrait with a meal. Bread and wine are sustenance language, the ordinary staples of an ordinary table, and that is the horror of the image: harm has become groceries, consumed daily without ceremony and missed when absent. The verse can be read two ways, bread obtained by wickedness or wickedness consumed as bread, and both land in the same place, a life that feeds on what destroys. Appetite is trainable; that is the warning underneath. What a person feeds on repeatedly stops tasting like a choice and starts tasting like dinner.
Related: Proverbs 9:17 · Job 15:16
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.