Scripture Daily

Context No. 193 of 4322 · Proverbs

Context · Reflection

Proverbs 7:1-16: in context

1My son, keep my words. Lay up my commandments within you. 2Keep my commandments and live! Guard my teaching as the apple of your eye. 3Bind them on your fingers. Write them on the tablet of your heart. 4Tell wisdom, “You are my sister.” Call understanding your relative, 5that they may keep you from the strange woman, from the foreigner who flatters with her words. 6For at the window of my house, I looked out through my lattice. 7I saw among the simple ones. I discerned among the youths a young man void of understanding, 8passing through the street near her corner, he went the way to her house, 9in the twilight, in the evening of the day, in the middle of the night and in the darkness. 10Behold, there a woman met him with the attire of a prostitute, and with crafty intent. 11She is loud and defiant. Her feet don’t stay in her house. 12Now she is in the streets, now in the squares, and lurking at every corner. 13So she caught him, and kissed him. With an impudent face she said to him: 14“Sacrifices of peace offerings are with me. Today I have paid my vows. 15Therefore I came out to meet you, to diligently seek your face, and I have found you. 16I have spread my couch with carpets of tapestry, with striped cloths of the yarn of Egypt.

Proverbs is written as a father instructing a son, and this passage is the longest and most cinematic of its warnings. It opens with the usual charge, keep my words, bind them on your fingers, write them on the tablet of your heart, call wisdom your sister.

Then the father says he looked out through the lattice of his window and watched. He saw among the simple a young man with no sense, going down the street near her corner, walking toward her house in the twilight, in the evening, at the time of night and darkness. The teaching becomes an eyewitness account with a time stamp, and the young man's route is deliberate. He is not ambushed. He walks there.

The woman meets him dressed for it and loud and wayward, and her pitch is religious before it is anything else: I had to offer sacrifices, and today I have paid my vows, so I came out to meet you. She has meat at home because of an offering, and she uses that as the invitation. Then the perfumed bed, the husband away on a journey with the money bag, home at full moon. The father is not warning about a sudden temptation. He is describing a young man on a road he chose and a proposition that arrives wearing devotion. What am I walking near at the hour when I know who is out?

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