1My son, if you take up my sayings,
and my commands you store within you,
2to make your ear hearken to wisdom,
incline your heart to discernment,
3for if you call out to understanding,
raise your voice to discernment,
4if you seek it like silver,
search for it like treasure,
5then will you understand the LORD’s fear,
and you will find the knowledge of God.
6For the LORD gives wisdom,
from His mouth, discerning knowledge.
7He stores for the upright prudence,
a shield to those who walk blameless,
8to keep the paths of justice
and He watches the way of His faithful.
9Then you will understand righteousness, justice,
and uprightness, each pathway of good.
10For wisdom will enter your heart,
and knowledge be sweet to your palate.
11Cunning will watch over you,
discernment will keep you,
12to save you from a way of evil,
from a man who speaks perversely.
13They forsake the paths of uprightness
to go in the ways of darkness,
14they rejoice to do evil,
delight in evil’s perverseness,
15whose paths are crooked,
and twisted in their pathways.
16To save you from a stranger-woman,
from a smooth-talking alien woman,
17who forsakes the guide of her youth
and the pact of her God forgets.
18For her house leads down to death
and to the shades, her pathways.
19All who come to her will not return,
and will not attain the paths of life.
20So that you walk in the way of the good,
and the paths of the just you keep.
21For the upright will dwell on earth
and the blameless survive on it.
22But the wicked are cut off from the earth,
and traitors torn away from it.
CHAPTER 2 NOTES
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1. take up my sayings. Here, as elsewhere, the Mentor presents himself as an authoritative figure who is the dependable source of wisdom for his as yet untutored disciple.
5. then will you understand the LORD’s fear. Since the fear of the LORD is represented definitionally as the beginning of wisdom, the converse is also true: a person, by making a strenuous and sincere effort to discover wisdom, will come to understand what fear of the LORD is, for He (verse 6) is the one who ultimately imparts all wisdom.
7. a shield. The notion that wisdom protects one from mishaps is of a piece with the general conception of wisdom’s possessing pragmatic advantages.
10. For wisdom will enter your heart. Here and above, in verse 2, the English reader should recall that the heart is conceived as the seat of understanding (rather like “mind”), although it also is associated with emotion.
11. Cunning. See the comment on 1:4. It may be useful to keep in mind that “cunning” in English is not always a negative term. Consider, for example, such usages as “cunning design.”
12. perversely. The Hebrew tahapukhot suggests things topsy-turvy, upended from their proper place. Proverbs repeatedly uses antithetical spatial metaphors for the good and the evil life. The former is a straight way; the latter is perverse, topsy-turvy, or, as in verse 15, crooked and twisted.
13. They forsake the paths of uprightness. The Hebrew here and in the next verse uses a plural participial form: “forsaking the paths.” This entire first piece of admonition to the young man is quite general, warning him to stay away from bad people. The unit that begins with verse 16 is more specific—a warning of the dangers of the sexual seductress.
15. twisted. That is, both the paths and the men who go on them are twisted.
16. stranger-woman. The meaning of the Hebrew zarah has been much debated. The usual English designation, “strange woman,” is misleading because it implies that she is strange—that is, somehow bizarre. She is not, as some have claimed, a prostitute because verse 17 indicates that she is married. There is also scant suggestion that, as others have argued, she is a foreigner, even though the parallel term in this line, nokhriyah, “alien woman,” often means foreigner. In cultic contexts, a zar is someone prohibited from entering the sacred zone of the sanctuary because he is not a priest. That sense is relevant to our text: the married woman, because she is contracted to another man, is prohibited to the susceptible youth. The paired term nokhriyah, then, in the poetic parallelism, probably has the force of “another man’s wife”—alien in a sexual rather than a national sense.
17. the guide of her youth. While some render ʾaluf as “companion,” the point is, in this patriarchal society, that the husband is expected to provide moral guidance for his wife, which in this case she has flagrantly ignored. The verbal root of the Hebrew noun means “to instruct” and has no association with companionability.
the pact of her God. Given the context of abandoning her husband-guide, the most likely reference is to the marriage contract, or perhaps, by extension, to the divine prohibition of adultery.
18. her house leads down to death. More literally, “stoops down” or “tilts down.” It is unnecessary to emend beytah, “her house,” to netivatah, “her path,” as some have proposed, because the phrase offers a vivid image of the house of the adulteress—her husband may be away on business, as in chapter 7—as a death trap: you enter it and find yourself on a chute sliding down into the realm of death. The writer seems to assume that adultery leads to death as a condign punishment, though he might have in mind the consequence of the husband’s vengeance (compare 7:23).
19. All who come to. The Hebrew makes a pointed pun because to come into a woman means to have sex with her. The house leading down to death is thus metonymically linked with the woman’s body leading to death.
21. the upright will dwell on earth. The multivalent Hebrew ʾerets here has the sense of “earth,” not “land,” because what is at issue is survival in life: the person who follows the ethical path marked out by wisdom will live long on earth while the wicked die before their time (the next verse), like the men who succumb to the wiles of the seductress.