Reflections on Proverbs 5

 Proverbs 05 (Contemporary English Version)

1. My son, if you listen closely to my wisdom and good sense,
   
2. you will have sound judgment, and you will always know the right thing to say.
   
3. The words of an immoral woman may be as sweet as honey and as smooth as olive oil.
   
4. But all that you really get from being with her is bitter poison and pain.
   
5. If you follow her, she will lead you down to the world of the dead.
   
6. She has missed the path that leads to life and doesn't even know it.
   
7. My son, listen to me and do everything I say.
   
8. Stay away from a bad woman! Don't even go near the door of her house.
   
9. You will lose your self-respect and end up in debt to some cruel person for the rest of your life.
   
10. Strangers will get your money and everything else you have worked for.
    
11. When it's all over, your body will waste away, as you groan
    
12. and shout, "I hated advice and correction!
    
13. I paid no attention to my teachers,
    
14. and now I am disgraced in front of everyone."
    
15. You should be faithful to your wife, just as you take water from your own well.
    
16. And don't be like a stream from which just any woman may take a drink.
    
17. Save yourself for your wife and don't have sex with other women.
    
18. Be happy with the wife you married when you were young.
    
19. She is beautiful and graceful, just like a deer; you should be attracted to her and stay deeply in love.
    
20. Don't go crazy over a woman who is unfaithful to her own husband!
    
21. The LORD sees everything, and he watches us closely.
    
22. Sinners are trapped and caught by their own evil deeds.
    
23. They get lost and die because of their foolishness and lack of self-control.

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In this proverb the father warns his son about the hazards of finding sexual pleasure outside of marriage. The prostitute knows how to entice and her words are "smoother than oil," and he can easily be drawn to her. But in the end the son's experience with her will be bitter, for she will drag him down to death along with herself. So the father was anxious to direct his son away from this temptation which is common among young men. And the father's counsel was simple: "Keep your way far from her. Don't go near the door of her house." Avoidance is the best policy, he says.

Then the father tells his son what is at risk. Becoming enticed by the prostitute or even another woman who is not his wife is not just a simple pleasure for an evening like some other form of entertainment. Involving himself with a forbidden woman ties himself to her in a way that he cannot simply walk away from. Not completely. She will take from him his vitality and drain his resources and at the end of his life he will regret that he didn't listen to his father or other teachers.

A much better alternative is to have his sexual thirst quenched from the cistern of his own wife. "Drink water from your own cistern," the father says. The pleasures of his wife are for him alone. Why, then, would he become infatuated with a forbidden woman. Following such a path will not be hidden from the Lord, and he will examine such behavior. Furthermore, the son will find himself entrapped by his own iniquities and "entangled in the ropes of his own sin." In the end he will be lost due to his own stupidity.