Proverbs 5:1–23

¹My son, to my wisdom O do pay attention. To my discernment incline your ears,²so as to guard thinking abilities; and may your own lips safeguard knowledge itself.

³For as a honeycomb the lips of a strange woman keep dripping, and her palate is smoother than oil.⁴But the aftereffect from her is as bitter as wormwood; it is as sharp as a two‐edged sword.⁵Her feet are descending to death. Her very steps take hold on She′ol itself.⁶The path of life she does not contemplate. Her tracks have wandered she does not know [where].⁷So now, O sons, listen to me and do not turn away from the sayings of my mouth.⁸Keep your way far off from alongside her, and do not get near to the entrance of her house,⁹that you may not give to others your dignity, nor your years to what is cruel;¹⁰that strangers may not satisfy themselves with your power, nor the things you got by pain be in the house of a foreigner,¹¹nor you have to groan in your future when your flesh and your organism come to an end.¹²And you will have to say: “How I have hated discipline and my heart has disrespected even reproof!¹³And I have not listened to the voice of my instructors, and to my teachers I have not inclined my ear.¹⁴Easily I have come to be in every sort of badness in the midst of the congregation and of the assembly.”

¹⁵Drink water out of your own cistern, and tricklings out of the midst of your own well.¹⁶Should your springs be scattered out of doors, [your] streams of water in the public squares themselves?¹⁷Let them prove to be for you alone, and not for strangers with you.¹⁸Let your water source prove to be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of your youth,¹⁹a 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.²⁰So why should you, my son, be in an ecstasy with a strange woman or embrace the bosom of a foreign woman?²¹For the ways of man are in front of the eyes of Jehovah, and he is contemplating all his tracks.²²His own errors will catch the wicked one, and in the ropes of his own sin he will be taken hold of.²³He will be the one to die because there is no discipline, and [because] in the abundance of his foolishness he goes astray.