Proverbs 30:15

Proverbs 30:15, in plain English

The leech has two daughters, both named 'Give.' The leech is never satisfied—it just keeps demanding more and more. This is what greed looks like.

Why it's here

Agur shifts to shorter, pithy observations. The leech is a perfect image for insatiable desire. It attaches itself and draws blood endlessly. He's personifying greed as something alive, something that reproduces itself. 'Give and Give'—there's never enough. His listeners would recognize themselves or people they know in this image: the hunger that never stops.

Who's speaking

Agur, using nature observation to teach about greed

Where it sits in the story

This is part of wisdom literature's repeated warning about desiring too much. It connects to the rich fool in Jesus's parable who builds bigger barns but dies that night, and to the teaching that 'the love of money is the root of all evil.'

The scholarly reading

The leech has two daughters named 'Give' and 'Give'—an image suggesting insatiable, parasitic desire that perpetually demands more.

Language and setting

This cryptic verse employs a parable structure to address the vice of greed. The leech (ʿalûqâ) functions as symbol of parasitic consumption; it drains blood without satiation. The daughters bear the name 'Give, Give' (hāb hāb), a reduplication that emphasizes relentless demand. Ancient commentators (including Ibn Ezra, Rashi, and later Christian interpreters) interpreted this metaphorically: the leech represents insatiable desire, and its daughters represent the two realms of its consumption—material goods and sensory pleasure. The simplicity of the image masks profound psychological insight: some appetites are self-perpetuating, never reaching satisfaction. The numerical form (two things) follows the pattern established in verse 7, suggesting this represents part of a larger catalog of observations about cosmic and moral order. The verse's spare language creates haunting effect; we never learn what the daughters do—only that they demand, ceaselessly. This represents what scholars identify as 'numerical wisdom'—the organization of observations into arithmetic sequences that suggest underlying order and completeness.

Voice

Agur, now offering symbolic-parabolic wisdom rather than direct moral instruction.

Significance

This image of insatiable demand becomes crucial to New Testament teaching on covetousness (pleonexia), particularly in 1 Timothy 6:10 ('the love of money is the root of all evil') and Luke 12:15, where Jesus warns against greed as the fundamental spiritual disorder.

13There is a generation—how haughty are their eyes and pretentious are their glances—

14there is a generation whose teeth are swords and whose jaws are knives, devouring the oppressed from the earth and the needy from among men.

15The leech has two daughters: Give and Give.

17As for the eye that mocks a father and scorns obedience to a mother, may the ravens of the valley pluck it out and young vultures devour it.

Read all of Proverbs 30 — A different voice — Agur, who says: I am too stupid to be a man. Then he writes some of the most brilliant observations in the entire book.