Proverbs, 7

¹ My son, keep my sayings, and may you treasure up my own commandments with you.

² Keep my commandments and continue living, and my law like the pupil of your eyes.

³ Tie them upon your fingers, and write them upon the tablet of your heart.

⁴ Say to wisdom: “You are my sister”; and may you call understanding itself “Kinswoman,”

⁵ to guard you against the woman stranger, against the foreigner who has made her own sayings smooth.

⁶ For at the window of my house, through my lattice I looked down,

⁷ that I might peer upon the inexperienced ones. I was interested in discerning among the sons a young man in want of heart,^*1

⁸ passing along on the street near her corner, and in the way to her house he marches,

⁹ in the twilight, in the evening of the day, at the approach^*1 of the night and the gloom.

¹⁰ And, look! there was a woman to meet him, with the garment of a prostitute and cunning^*1 of heart.

¹¹ She is boisterous and stubborn. In her house her feet do not keep residing.

¹² Now she is outdoors, now she is in the public squares, and near every corner she lies in wait.

¹³ And she has grabbed hold of him and given him a kiss. She has put on a bold face, and she begins to say to him:

¹⁴ “Communion sacrifices were incumbent upon me. Today I have paid my vows.

¹⁵ That is why I have come out to meet you, to look for your face, that I may find you.

¹⁶ With coverlets I have bedecked my divan, with many-colored things, linen of Egypt.

¹⁷ I have besprinkled my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon.

¹⁸ Do come, let us drink our fill of love until the morning; do let us enjoy each other with love expressions.

¹⁹ For the husband is not in his house; he has gone traveling on a way of some distance.

²⁰ A bag of money^*1 he has taken in his hand. On the day of the full moon he will come to his house.”

²¹ She has misled him by the abundance of her persuasiveness. By the smoothness of her lips she seduces him.

²² All of a sudden he is going after her,^*1 like a bull that comes even to the slaughter, and just as if fettered^*2 for the discipline of a foolish man,

²³ until an arrow cleaves open his liver, just as a bird hastens into the trap, and he has not known that it involves his very soul.^*1

²⁴ And now, O sons, listen to me and pay attention to the sayings of my mouth.

²⁵ May your heart not turn aside to her ways. Do not wander into her roadways.

²⁶ For many are the ones she has caused to fall down slain, and all those being killed by her are numerous.

²⁷ The ways to Sheʹol^*1 her house is; they are descending to the interior rooms of death.