poverty: having no means to live on. It names the condition itself, not the person who is poor.
This is the book of Proverbs' word for poverty, and it turns up nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. Hebrew has plenty of words for the poor person, such as the one who is low and weak (דַּל). This word does something different: it names the condition that person is living in. The related verb (רוּשׁ) gives Proverbs its usual way of saying that someone is poor, while this noun names what being poor actually is.
Proverbs uses it in two ways that pull against each other.
- Four of the seven verses treat poverty as something that arrives. Twice it walks in on the lazy man like a prowler (Proverbs 6:11 and Proverbs 24:34), once it follows the person who shrugs off correction, and once it fills the plate of the man who chases empty schemes.
- The other three treat it as simply where a person already stands: it is what ruins the poor in Proverbs 10:15, what Agur asks God to spare him in Proverbs 30:8, and what a man in misery drinks to forget in Proverbs 31:7.
Holding both together is the point. Proverbs really does teach that habits have outcomes, and it also says plainly that poverty is what destroys the poor and that they are owed generosity rather than a lecture. In two of the seven verses the word is paired with a second word for what a household is short of (מַחְסוֹר), which keeps the picture concrete: not a statistic but an empty cupboard and a bare table.