Proverbs - Chapter 5 - A Conservative Version
- My son, attend to my wisdom. Incline thine ear to my understanding,
- that thou may preserve discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.
- For the lips of an interloping woman drop honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil.
- But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.
- Her feet go down to death. Her steps take hold on Sheol,
- so that she does not find the level path of life. Her ways are unstable, [and] she does not know.
- Now therefore, ye sons, hearken to me, and do not depart from the words of my mouth.
- Remove thy way far from her, and do not come near the door of her house,
- lest thou give thine honor to others, and thy years to the cruel,
- lest strangers be filled with thy strength, and thy labors [be] in the house of an alien,
- and thou mourn at thy latter end when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,
- and say, How I have hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof.
- Neither have I obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined my ear to those who instructed me!
- I was almost in all evil in the midst of the assembly and congregation.
- Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.
- Should thy springs be dispersed abroad, and streams of water in the streets?
- Let them be for thyself alone, and not for strangers with thee.
- Let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of thy youth:
- a loving hind and a pleasant doe. Let her breasts satisfy thee at all times, and be thou ravished always with her love.
- For why should thou, my son, be ravished with an interloping woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?
- For the ways of man are before the eyes of LORD, and he makes level all his paths.
- His own iniquities shall take a wicked man, and he shall be held with the cords of his sin.
- He shall die for lack of instruction. And in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.