Proverbs 11:24-25

The proverb states a piece of arithmetic that refuses to balance. One person gives things away and somehow ends up richer; another clutches what he has and somehow ends up poorer. By every rule we were taught about scarcity — that a pie has only so many slices, that what leaves the hand is simply gone — this should not work. And yet the sages set it down as a settled observation, the way you would note that water runs downhill. They had watched enough lives to see the pattern: the open hand is fuller at the end than the closed one.

It helps to notice what kind of enrichment they mean. This is not a promise that generosity is a shrewd investment, money loaned out at interest to come back doubled. The picture in the last line is agricultural and quieter than that: <em>one who waters will himself be watered.</em> The farmer who carries water to the field is not depleting himself; he has joined a circulation larger than his own bucket. Something about giving opens us to a supply that hoarding seals off. The miser is not merely stingy — he is thirsty, standing guard over a cistern that has begun to stagnate. The generous are watered because they stayed in the current instead of damming it.

Wisdom here is not a technique for getting more. It is the discovery that we were made to be conduits, not reservoirs — and that the open channel is the one that stays fresh.

Bunyan turns the proverb into a riddle and lets its madness show. By the world's accounting the generous man is a fool — casting away what he could keep — and by that same accounting he should end up empty. He ends up full. The couplet holds the exact paradox the sages saw: the hand that opens is the hand that receives, and what looks like loss is the very shape of a life kept fresh. To water is to be watered.