Don't Wear Yourself Out
When you glance at wealth, it disappears, for it makes wings for itself and flies like an eagle to the sky. Proverbs 23:5 · Berean Standard Bible
Wealth is here one moment and gone the next—it's not something you can count on or build your life around because it has no real stability.
Picture someone watching their fortune disappear. In ancient times, fortunes could change overnight through war, bad investments, or theft. The image of wealth growing wings and flying away would have resonated with real human experience.
A father or wise teacher speaking to a young person
This echoes what Jesus later teaches about laying up treasures in heaven, not on earth. The entire biblical arc reminds us that material things are temporary, and that's simply reality we need to accept.
Wealth possesses an ephemeral, almost supernatural quality—it can vanish in an instant, making it a fundamentally unreliable foundation for security or hope.
The image of wealth acquiring wings and flying skyward employs a striking mythological or supernatural register unusual even within Proverbs. Some scholars, including William McKane, detect possible echoes of economic instability in post-exilic Judah, where rapid shifts in fortune were observable realities. The phrase suggests not merely loss but active escape, as if wealth possesses autonomous agency.
The sage, utilizing poetic hyperbole and visionary language to shatter the listener's assumption that accumulated goods provide permanent security.
This vision of wealth's evanescence prefigures the New Testament's repeated insistence on the transience of material possession, culminating in the rich fool of Luke 12 and the instruction in 1 Timothy 6 that 'we brought nothing into the world, and we can take nothing out of it.'
3Do not crave his delicacies, for that food is deceptive.
4Do not wear yourself out to get rich; be wise enough to restrain yourself.
5When you glance at wealth, it disappears, for it makes wings for itself and flies like an eagle to the sky.
6Do not eat the bread of a stingy man, and do not crave his delicacies;
7for he is keeping track, inwardly counting the cost. “Eat and drink,” he says to you, but his heart is not with you.
Read all of Proverbs 23 — Do not wear yourself out to get rich. Have the wisdom to show restraint. Riches sprout wings and fly away like an eagle.
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