The paragraph it belongs to. The line is almost always quoted alone. In the text it is the middle of three verses about accepting a meal from a man who does not mean the invitation. "Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, Neither desire thou his dainties" (Proverbs 23:6, ASV). Then the famous line, and with it the reason: "Eat and drink, saith he to thee; But his heart is not with thee" (Proverbs 23:7, ASV). Then the result: "The morsel which thou hast eaten shalt thou vomit up, And lose thy sweet words" (Proverbs 23:8, ASV). The subject of the passage is a host whose hospitality is a performance.
The two readings of the famous line. The King James Version prints: "For as he thinketh in his heart, so [is] he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; but his heart [is] not with thee" (Proverbs 23:7, KJV). The American Standard Version prints: "For as he thinketh within himself, so is he: Eat and drink, saith he to thee; But his heart is not with thee" (Proverbs 23:7, ASV). The Berean Standard Bible does not use "think" at all: "for he is keeping track, inwardly counting the cost" (Proverbs 23:7, BSB).
What the tagged text shows about the noun. The verse contains two different Hebrew words, and only the second is the heart word. The first, in "in his heart", is בְּנַפְשׁוֹ, tagged H5315G (nephesh), glossed in the interlinear as "in/ self/ his". The second, in "but his heart is not with thee", is וְלִבּוֹ, tagged H3820A (lev), the actual word for heart. The ASV's "within himself" is the closer rendering of the first.
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And the verb is not "think" either. The word is שָׁעַר (sha'ar, H8176), which the lexicon defines as "to split open, reason out, calculate, reckon, estimate", and whose single illustrative citation is this very verse: "(Qal) to calculate Pr 23:7". It is the vocabulary of working out a price, not of holding an opinion, which is what the BSB's "counting the cost" is rendering.
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What all this does and does not show. It does not show that the King James is wrong: nephesh legitimately covers the self and its thinking, and "in his heart" is a defensible English choice for it. It shows two narrower and more useful things. First, a reader tracing the Hebrew heart word will not find it where the English puts it. Second, the sentence is doing a different job in its paragraph than it does when quoted alone. In context it is about a man whose private reckoning, not his hospitable speech, is what he actually is. ⛔ What is NOT claimed here is that anyone quoting it is wrong to draw a wider lesson from it; that is a question about how proverbs are read, and this file is about what the words say.
One more translator's choice in the same paragraph. The Hebrew of verse 6 is literally רַע עָיִן, "evil of eye" (H7451H + H5869I), which the ASV and KJV keep as "an evil eye" and the BSB renders by its sense, "a stingy man" (Proverbs 23:6, BSB). Both are the same two Hebrew words; one preserves the idiom and one explains it.
Sources: Proverbs 23:6-8 (KJV, ASV, BSB); the Strong's-tagged interlinear rows for Proverbs 23:6 and Proverbs 23:7; TBESH entries H5315G, H3820A, H8176, H7451H and H5869I.
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