Warning Against the Strange Woman

• store my commandments with you.
• 2 Keep my commands and live, and my teaching like the apple of your eye .[fn]
• 3 Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart.
• 4 Say to wisdom,[fn] “you are my sister,” and you shall call insight,[fn] “ intimate friend .”[fn]
• 5 In order to guard yourself from an adulteress ,[fn] from the foreigner who makes her words smooth .[fn]
• 6 For at the window of my house, through my lattice, I looked down.
• 7 And I saw among the simple, I observed among the youth,
• a young man lacking sense ,[fn]
• 8 passing on the street at[fn] her corner, and he takes the road to her house,
• 9 at twilight, at the day’s evening, in the midst of night and the darkness.
• 10 Then behold! A woman comes to meet him with the garment of a prostitute[fn] and a secret heart .[fn]
• 11 She is loud and stubborn; her feet do not stay at her house.
• 12 Now in the street, now in the square, at[fn] every corner she lies in wait.
• 13 She took hold of[fn] him and kissed him. Her face was impudent, and she said to him,
• 14 “Sacrifices of peace offerings are upon me; today[fn] I completed my vows.
• 15 So[fn] I have come out to meet you, to seek your face, and I have found you.
• 16 With coverings I have adorned my couch, spreads of the linen of Egypt;
• 17 I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
• 18 Come, let us take our fill of love making, until the morning let us delight in love.
• 19 For there is no man[fn] in his home; he has gone on a long journey .[fn]
• 20 The bag of money he took in his hand, for on the day of the full moon he will come home.”
• 21 She persuades him with the greatness of her teachings; with her smooth lips she compels him.
• 22 He goes after her suddenly; like an ox to the slaughter he goes,
• and like a stag to the instruction of a fool,
• 23 until an arrow pierces his entrails ,[fn] like a bird rushing into a snare,
• but he does not know that it will cost him his life .[fn]