Proverbs 7

Proverbs 7 is the seventh chapter of the Book of Proverbs in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. The book is a compilation of several wisdom literature collections, with the heading in 1:1 may be intended to regard Solomon as the traditional author of the whole book, but the dates of the individual collections are difficult to determine, and the book probably obtained its final shape in the post-exilic period. This chapter is a part of the first collection of the book.

Text

Hebrew

The following table shows the Hebrew text of Proverbs 7 with vowels alongside an English translation based upon the JPS 1917 translation.

Verse	Hebrew	English translation
1		My son, keep my words, And lay up my commandments with thee.
2		Keep my commandments and live, And my teaching as the apple of thine eye.
3		Bind them upon thy fingers, Write them upon the table of thy heart.
4		Say unto wisdom: ‘Thou art my sister’, And call understanding thy kinswoman;
5		That they may keep thee from the strange woman, From the alien woman that maketh smooth her words.
6		For at the window of my house I looked forth through my lattice;
7		And I beheld among the thoughtless ones, I discerned among the youths, A young man void of understanding,
8		Passing through the street near her corner, And he went the way to her house;
9		In the twilight, in the evening of the day, In the blackness of night and the darkness.
10		And, behold, there met him a woman With the attire of a harlot, and wily of heart.
11		She is riotous and rebellious, Her feet abide not in her house;
12		Now she is in the streets, now in the broad places, And lieth in wait at every corner.
13		So she caught him, and kissed him, And with an impudent face she said unto him:
14		’Sacrifices of peace-offerings were due from me; This day have I paid my vows.
15		Therefore, came I forth to meet thee, To seek thy face, and I have found thee.
16		I have decked my couch with coverlets, With striped cloths of the yarn of Egypt.
17		I have perfumed my bed With myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18		Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning; Let us solace ourselves with loves.
19		For my husband is not at home, He is gone a long journey;
20		He hath taken the bag of money with him; He will come home at the full moon.’
21		With her much fair speech she causeth him to yield, With the blandishment of her lips she enticeth him away.
22		He goeth after her straightway, As an ox that goeth to the slaughter, Or as one in fetters to the correction of the fool;
23		Till an arrow strike through his liver; As a bird hasteneth to the snare— And knoweth not that it is at the cost of his life.
24		Now therefore, O ye children, hearken unto me, And attend to the words of my mouth.
25		Let not thy heart decline to her ways, Go not astray in her paths.
26		For she hath cast down many wounded; Yea, a mighty host are all her slain.
27		Her house is the way to the nether-world, Going down to the chambers of death.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text, which includes the Aleppo Codex, and Codex Leningradensis. Fragments containing parts of this chapter in Hebrew were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls including 4Q103 with extant verses 9, 11.
There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BC; some extant ancient manuscripts of this version include Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, and Codex Alexandrinus.

Analysis

This chapter belongs to a section regarded as the first collection in the book of Proverbs, known as "Didactic discourses". The Jerusalem Bible describes chapters 1–9 as a prologue of the chapters 10–22:16, the so-called " proverbs of Solomon", as "the body of the book".
The chapter has the following structure:

Parental instruction to accept teaching against the wiles of the harlot
Example story on the wiles of the harlot
Concluding instruction to avoid the harlot

The wiles of a harlot (7:1–5)

The appeal for the son to accept the instruction in this section closely echoes 6:20–24. Wisdom is to be treated as a 'sister', to counter the attraction to the adulteress. It is followed by a story presented in the form of the personal reminiscence of the narrator.

Verse 2

"Apple of my eye": from a Hebrew phrase that refers to "the pupil of the eye"; perhaps by the idiom “the little man in eye", because the word אִישׁוֹן, ʾishon, "pupil", seems to be a diminutive from אִישׁ, ʾish, "man". This phrase is found in several other places in the Hebrew Bible. The phrase "has the idea of something precious that was to be guarded jealously", because of the importance of protecting the eye from harm, and can be rendered in a more contemporary wording to be "as your most prized possession."

The crafty harlot (7:6–27)

This section records "an example story on the wiles of the adulteress... cast in the form of personal reminiscence". The narrator observes a wayward youth through the lattice of his window. This young man was going through darkening streets towards the house of the adulteress and there he is accosted by the woman who dressed like a prostitute and spoke with 'smoothness' —the harlot's chief weapon. Unable to resist the advances and oblivious to the real cost to pay, the young man follows the harlot like a beast to the slaughter, or a bird caught in her snare.
The final paragraph reinforces the instruction to avoid the deadly paths of the adulteress or harlot, because her house is "the vestibule to Sheol and leads down to death".