This verse closes the father's lecture on adultery and the wife of your youth, Proverbs 5:1–23.
Quick answer
The lecture's last word, and it names the cause precisely: not lack of information but lack of instruction received. The final verb is the chapter's intoxication word, now meaning to stagger.
Read the whole unit
This lecture is the book's most sustained treatment of sexual faithfulness, and it moves in three sweeps. First the warning (vv. 1–14): a woman who is not his speaks in honey and oil, and the father tracks where that road actually goes, past bitterness and a two-edged sword, past squandered vigor and years handed to strangers, ending in an old man's speech of regret spoken over a wasted body. Then the alternative (vv. 15–20), and this is what makes the chapter unusual: it does not finish with prohibition. It turns to water, cisterns, wells, and running streams, and tells the son to drink deeply at home, to rejoice in the wife of his youth, to be satisfied and delighted. The chapter's answer to a wrong love is a right one, offered warmly and without embarrassment. Finally the reason (vv. 21–23): the LORD is watching, weighing every path, and a man who refuses instruction is bound not by God's ropes but by his own.
Three words hold the lecture together, and each one repays attention.
The first is intoxication. The verb behind "enraptured" in verse 19 appears again in verse 20 and once more in verse 23, where it is rendered "go astray." The NKJV footnotes its literal sense at verse 19: intoxicated. So the lecture's spine is a single question about one capacity. The son is built to be swept away by love; the father never suggests otherwise and never asks him to want less. He asks him where the intoxication will be spent, because the same word that means delight in verse 19 means staggering in verse 23.
The second is weighing. Verse 21 says the LORD "ponders" every path, and the footnote gives the literal sense: weighs. It is the same verb the father used at 4:26, "Ponder the path of your feet," and the same one that appears in verse 6, where the woman's road is precisely what cannot be weighed. A man is asked to weigh his way; one road makes weighing impossible; God weighs it all regardless.
The third is the word behind "immoral." In verse 3 the NKJV footnotes it: literally a strange woman. The Hebrew term means other, outside, not-yours, and it runs through the chapter attached to strangers who consume a man's wealth (v. 10) and strangers who must not share what is his (v. 17). This matters for how the chapter is read. It is not a verdict on women, and the catalog must not let it become one. The word describes a relationship, not a character type: she is the woman who is not his. The father is not teaching his son that women are dangerous. He is teaching him what his own appetite will do with an opportunity, and every consequence listed in verses 9 through 14 lands on the son, not on her.
One more thing should be said plainly, because this chapter has been used badly. It is preventive literature, spoken at a fork the son has not yet reached, and its power is in arriving early. For a reader who is already past that fork, the chapter's warnings describe a road already walked, and the word that reader needs is not this lecture but the one Jesus spoke to a woman dragged in from exactly this sin: neither do I condemn you. Both are true. The warning stands at full strength for the one still choosing, and the door stands open for the one who did not heed it.
What this verse contributes
This verse closes the argument by returning to its first word and its central one. The cause of death is "lack of instruction," musar, the very thing the old man confessed to hating back at verse 12, which makes the lecture a closed circle: refuse formation, and formation's absence is what finally kills. Then the last verb lands. It is the same word rendered "enraptured" at verses 19 and 20, and here it is "go astray," a man reeling. The capacity that was meant to make him glad at home has become the thing that makes him unsteady on his feet. That is the whole chapter in one word, and the father lets it fall without further comment.
What it does not mean
This is not a pronouncement that a person who has committed adultery is beyond help, and it must never be used to tell anyone that their life is now simply the ropes. The verse describes a trajectory, which is a statement about a direction, not about a destiny; the entire lecture exists because trajectories can be changed by instruction received in time. Nor is it a lens for reading other people's suffering, as though hardship revealed a hidden sin. Proverbs speaks here about the road, not about God's disposition toward the man standing on it.
From this side of the cross
For the reader still choosing, the warning stands at full strength and needs no softening. For the reader who is already past the fork, this lecture is not the last word Scripture has. Jesus met a woman caught in exactly this sin, watched her accusers leave, and said, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more" (John 8:11). Both halves of that sentence are real, and the order is the gospel's order: no condemnation first, and the new road after. The cords in verse 22 were genuinely his own, and the One who cut them did not wait to be asked whether the man deserved it.
Related: John 8:10–11 · Proverbs 5:12 · Romans 8:1 · 1 Corinthians 6:9–11
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.