Proverbs 5:1-23
5 My son, to my wisdom O do pay attention.+ To my discernment incline your ears,+
2 so as to guard thinking abilities;+ and may your own lips safeguard knowledge itself.+
3 For as a honeycomb the lips of a strange woman keep dripping,+ and her palate is smoother than oil.+
4 But the aftereffect from her is as bitter as wormwood;+ it is as sharp as a two-edged sword.+
5 Her feet are descending to death.+ Her very steps take hold on Sheʹol* itself.+
6 The path of life she does not contemplate.+ Her tracks have wandered she does not know [where].+
7 So now, O sons, listen to me+ and do not turn away from the sayings of my mouth.+
8 Keep your way far off from alongside her, and do not get near to the entrance of her house,+
9 that you may not give to others your dignity,*+ nor your years to what is cruel;+
10 that strangers may not satisfy themselves with your power,+ nor the things you got by pain be in the house of a foreigner,+
11 nor you have to groan in your future+ when your flesh and your organism come to an end.+
12 And you will have to say: “How I have hated discipline+ and my heart has disrespected even reproof!+
13 And I have not listened to the voice of my instructors,+ and to my teachers I have not inclined my ear.+
14 Easily I have come to be in every sort of badness+ in the midst of the congregation and of the assembly.”+
15 Drink water out of your own cistern, and tricklings out of the midst of your own well.+
16 Should your springs be scattered out of doors,+ [your] streams of water in the public squares themselves?
17 Let them prove to be for you alone, and not for strangers with you.+
18 Let your water source prove to be blessed,+ and rejoice with the wife of your youth,+
19 a lovable hind and a charming mountain goat.+ Let her own breasts intoxicate you at all times.+ With her love may you be in an ecstasy constantly.+
20 So why should you, my son, be in an ecstasy with a strange woman or embrace the bosom of a foreign woman?+
21 For the ways of man* are in front of the eyes of Jehovah,+ and he is contemplating all his tracks.+
22 His own errors will catch the wicked one,*+ and in the ropes of his own sin he will be taken hold of.+
23 He will be the one to die because there is no discipline,+ and [because] in the abundance of his foolishness he goes astray.*+
Footnotes
^ “Sheol.” Heb., sheʼohlʹ; Gr., haiʹden; Lat., inʹfe·ros.
^ “Dignity,” M; TSy, “vital energy”; LXX, “life”; Vg, “honor.”
^ “Man.” Heb., ʼish.
^ Or, “catch him with the wicked one.”
^ “Will be swept away,” by a correction of M; LXX, “has been destroyed.”
