settled plans that are actually being followed: the course of action a person or a nation has fixed on, and in nearly every use one chosen instead of what God said.
This word names plans already decided on and being lived out, not advice that is merely on offer. It turns up seven times, and never once in the singular, so it points less to a single piece of guidance than to a whole policy: the set of decisions by which someone is actually running their life. That is why the older English "counsels" sounds too mild in most of these lines, and "their own plans" or "their own schemes" lands closer.
Six of the seven appearances are damning, and they fall into a pattern the Psalms and the prophets share:
- people walk in plans of their own instead of listening to God (Psalm 81:12; Jeremiah 7:24; Micah 6:16)
- the plans themselves become the punishment, so that people are fed with them or fall by them (Proverbs 1:31; Psalm 5:10)
- a nation is eaten up by war because of what it decided to do (Hosea 11:6)
In each case the plans belong to the people who made them, they were chosen over what God had said, and they come back on their makers.
The one bright use is Proverbs 22:20, where a teacher says he has written for his student in plans and knowledge, meaning guidance sound enough to hand on. So the word is not a label for wickedness; a plan is only as good as the one who makes it. The ordinary Hebrew word for counsel (עֵצָה) covers that whole range comfortably, including God's own purposes, while this one has narrowed almost entirely to human self-direction, close to the way the word for what the mind works out (מַחֲשָׁבָה) shades into plotting when the heart behind it is bad.