Proverbs5chapter 5

Proverbs 5:1-6

The son is told to keep discretion and knowledge in view before the warning even names its subject, because the strange woman's danger begins with speech that sounds pleasant, lips that drop as an honeycomb and a mouth smoother than oil. Her end reverses everything her opening promised: what began sweet turns bitter as wormwood, sharp as a blade honed on both sides, a taste that only shows itself after the pleasant one has done its work. Her feet go down to death and her steps take hold on hell, and the commentators read the whole picture as a warning against a road that looks good only from its beginning.

Proverbs 5:7-11

The counsel turns practical: remove thy way far from her, come not nigh the door of her house, treating distance itself as the safeguard rather than trusting resolve alone to hold at close range. The losses named are severe and public, honour given to others, years given to the cruel, wealth filling a stranger's house, labor spent to enrich a household that is not one's own. Gill reads the piling up of losses as deliberate, since the sin promises private pleasure but delivers public ruin.

Proverbs 5:12-14

The father stages the son's own future regret as a speech he can hear now before he lives it, a man near ruin confessing that he hated instruction and despised reproof. I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly names a public fall, not a private one, the very exposure the earlier verses warned against. Henry notes the timing: the regret arrives after the ruin, when correction can no longer undo what indulgence has done.

Proverbs 5:15-17

Against the stranger's well the father sets the son's own cistern, marital love pictured as water that is safely and rightly his, and the command to drink from it is the positive form of the warning that came before it. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad reads two ways in the commentators, either a father's hope for a full household or a warning read against wasted seed, and both readings are carried without one erasing the other. Let them be only thine own, and not strangers' with thee returns the point to its center: the water is good precisely because it is not shared.

Proverbs 5:18-19

The chapter's positive command is stated without hedging: let thy fountain be blessed, and rejoice with the wife of thy youth, marriage set forward as the answer to the strange woman rather than mere abstinence from her. The images that follow, the loving hind, the pleasant roe, are drawn from courtship language elsewhere in the wisdom books, and the son is told to be satisfied and even ravished with his own wife's love at all times, not only in youth. The commentators read the plainness of the language as intentional, a married love the text is not embarrassed to name.

Proverbs 5:20-23

embrace the bosom of a stranger: The father's question, why wilt thou be ravished with a strange woman, borrows the very word given to lawful love in verse nineteen and turns it against the appetite that verse just blessed, making plain that the danger is misdirected desire rather than desire itself. The chapter closes on a claim that reframes every private choice already named: the ways of man are before the eyes of the Lord, and he pondereth all his goings, so that no cistern is truly hidden. Gill reads the final verses, holden with the cords of his sins and dying without instruction, as sin's own discipline rather than an added penalty, the trap a man ties for himself.