Bible Strands
Proverbs 7:3
Tie them to your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — A father addresses his son within a warning against a seductive woman (Prov 7), immediately after commanding him to keep the father's teachings (v. 2) and just before personifying Wisdom as a sister (v. 4). The verse is the hinge: before the warning unfolds, the son is told to fix what he has already heard.
The words — לֻחַ (luach, H3871) means "tablet," the same word used for the stone tablets of the covenant (Exod 32:15-16; 34:1). קָשַׁר (qashar, H7194) means "bind" or "tie," the verb behind the tefillin command in Deuteronomy.
The thread — Proverbs 3:3 is the nearest parallel, using the identical "tablet of your heart" phrase. The "bind" language recurs in Deuteronomy 6:8 and 11:18, where it is paired with the physical acts of tying to hand and forehead.
Why it lands — The verse demands active, repeated fixation, not a single act of memorization. "Tie" and "write on a tablet" both imply permanence and effort; the reader is asked to make the teaching as durable as stone.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart.
Cross-references
- Deuteronomy 11:18 Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as reminders on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
- Proverbs 3:3 Never let loving devotion or faithfulness leave you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart.
- Deuteronomy 6:8 Tie them as reminders on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.
- Jeremiah 31:33 “But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people.
- 2 Corinthians 3:3 It is clear that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.
- Isaiah 30:8 Go now, write it on a tablet in their presence and inscribe it on a scroll; it will be for the days to come, a witness forever and ever.
- Proverbs 6:21 Bind them always upon your heart; tie them around your neck.
- Jeremiah 17:1 “The sin of Judah is written with an iron stylus, engraved with a diamond point on the tablets of their hearts and on the horns of their altars.