“Drink water from your own cistern”
Drink water from your own cistern, and running water from your own well. (Proverbs 5:15 BSB)
What it sounds like today
Odd advice about where to get your drinking water.
The cultural key
On its face this is a puzzling line about water sources. It is tactful marital imagery. In a dry land, a private cistern or well was a man's own precious, guarded supply, and here it stands for his own wife and the sexual intimacy that belongs to their marriage alone. 'Drink water from your own cistern' means find your satisfaction faithfully with her. The surrounding verses make the metaphor unmistakable: 'Why should your springs flow in the streets?' warns against spilling that intimacy outside the marriage (adultery), 'let them be yours alone, never shared with strangers,' and the passage resolves plainly, 'rejoice in the wife of your youth.' So the water language is a modest, poetic way of urging fidelity: keep your love within your own marriage rather than squandering it on others. A modern reader hears hydration advice; the first hearer heard a call to marital faithfulness.
Recovered meaning
'Drink water from your own cistern' is discreet imagery for marital fidelity: find intimacy faithfully with your own wife rather than letting your 'springs flow in the streets' through adultery. The passage makes the point explicit in urging joy in 'the wife of your youth.'