Proverbs 5:1-23
1 My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding:
2 That thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.
3 For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her moutha is smoother than oil:
4 But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword.
5 Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.
6 Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.
7 Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth.
8 Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house:
9 Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel:
10 Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth;b and thy labours be in the house of a stranger;
11 And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,
12 And say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof;
13 And have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me!
14 I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly.
15 Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.
16 Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets.
17 Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee.
18 Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.
19 Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfyc thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.
20 And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?
21 For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings.
22 His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.d
23 He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.
Proverbs 5:3. The lips of a strange woman drop as a honey-comb. She employs all her arts for bread, for drunkenness, for crime. How wretched, how bitter is the life of a ruined and abandoned woman. Their number is now alarming to the state. The men who support them are equal in number. Asylums are inadequate to remedy the hundredth part of the evil. In the purer ages of patriarchal society, they were put to death. When Tamar was pregnant, Judah said, “Bring her forth, and let her be burned.” Genesis 38:24. Maimonides names a case in which a priest's daughter was burned, during the sixth century. Unless the heads of houses are made responsible for female virtue, national ruin of health and character must be the consequence.
Proverbs 5:5. Her feet go down to death. Here is the remedy which God provides; a disease which consumes the body with rottenness and corruption: Proverbs 5:11. Her steps take hold on hell. This is the punishment of the soul beyond the grave. Solomon speaks as a father to the young men of his kingdom, and in particular to those of his court. He represents sin as a sharp sword with two edges, which kills the body and destroys the soul. He represents their deplorable case as pining away with disease, and all their wealth as filling the house of strangers. But argument is lost on men sold to sin. The good Fenelon represents Mentor as saving the almost yielding Telemachus, by taking him by the hair of the head, and throwing him from a rock into the sea, that he might swim to a ship. This is plucking out the right eye.
Horace describes the virtues of Ulysses as inflexible in character. On his return from Troy, he had to encounter a succession of difficulties, which he subdued. “You have heard of the charming voices of the syrens [Psalms 58:5] and of the deleterious cup of Circe. Had he drank the poison, as his foolish companions did, his return had been impossible; he had become the victim of an infamous woman, and been metamorphosed into an unclean dog, or a sow that wallows in the mire.”
Sirenum voces et Circæ pocula nôsti; Quæ si cum sociis stultus cupidusque bibisset, Sub dominâ meretrice fuisset turpis et excors, Vixisset canis immundus, vel amica luto sus. HORAT. EPIST. lib. 1. epist, 2. 50:23.
Proverbs 5:18. Rejoice with the wife of thy youth. The young man's heart will then rest in the bosom of virtue. Even while his affections are but engaged to the amiable companion of his life, he will feel a flame which is noble; attended with the approbation of both God and man, and which scorns the seductive charms of vice. When young people marry in the Lord, and with prudence, they taste the highest happiness prepared for man in this world, and lay a wise foundation for the augmentation of their eternal joy.
Proverbs 5:21. The ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord. The omniscience of God is the last dissuasive from criminal connections. Why should he sin when he cannot escape detection? Divine justice is laying snares for the wicked, that the most secret sins may be discovered by their fruits; that the public may say, he died as the fool dieth, for despising instruction. How preferable that youth should read the holy scriptures in seminaries, than authors grossly mixed with immodesty, with approbation of fashionable vices, and with hisses at real religion, under a pretext of ridiculing superstition. When they advocate a moral cause, and expatiate on virtue, there is not a vestige of that sacred influence which everywhere distinguishes the morality of the sacred writings.