Verse explainer
How you earn shapes whether what you earn lasts — ill-gotten wealth evaporates; what you build slowly and honestly tends to grow.
Wealth gotten by vanity shall be diminished: but he that gathereth by labour shall increase.
BSBDishonest wealth will dwindle, but what is earned through hard work will be multiplied.
The plain meaning
The proverb sets two trajectories against each other. "Vanity" here doesn't just mean pride — it means emptiness, nothingness: wealth assembled through fraud, exploitation, gambling, or any means that produces nothing of real value for anyone. The Hebrew carries the picture of something puffed up and hollow at the center. Such wealth is already undermined at its source, and the same habits that grabbed it tend to squander it. The contrast is the person who gathers "by hand" — steadily, honestly, by labour. The word for "increase" is the same root used for multiplication: what grows by honest work compounds rather than erodes. The point isn't that virtue is automatically rewarded by God in a mechanical way; Proverbs often speaks in patterns and tendencies, not promises. The insight is practical and moral at once: dishonest acquisition plants the seeds of its own loss, while steady, honest accumulation tends to build something that lasts and can even be shared.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Henry emphasizes that "vanity" covers not just outright fraud but any employment that is unlawful or that merely feeds pride and luxury — including gambling and the stage. Ill-gotten wealth tends to be spent on the same vanity that earned it, and so it shrinks. Honest labor, by contrast, grows toward sufficiency and then generosity — citing Ephesians 4:28, he notes that the honest laborer ends up with enough to give to those in need, at which point increase accelerates.
Gill surveys the range of "vanity": robbery, fraud, circumventing others in trade, gaming and dice, and illicit arts such as astrology. His striking note is on the alternate reading of the second half — gathering "unto the hand," meaning distributing to the poor. He cites the Targum directly: "he that gathereth and giveth to the poor shall increase in substance." On this reading, generosity is itself the mechanism of increase, not merely its byproduct.
JFB gives the sharpest, most compressed reading: "vanity" means what is useless to the public — wealth that circulates through vices that produce nothing anyone actually needs. The contrast with laboring "little by little" underscores that honest wealth is characteristically slow and steady. The real difference is not just moral but structural: one method builds, the other only transfers and depletes.
The word behind it
"Vanity" or "breath, vapor, emptiness." The same word Ecclesiastes uses relentlessly for all that is fleeting and hollow. Applied to wealth-getting, it points to methods that are insubstantial at the root — fraud, exploitation, gambling — things that create no real value. The word choice implies the wealth itself inherits the emptiness of its source: vapor-wealth dissipates like vapor. Gesenius notes its core sense is a breath or puff of air — here, something that looks like substance but has none.
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