Proverbs7chapter 7

Proverbs 7:1-5

My son, keep my words: The father's appeal opens exactly as chapters 2, 3 and 6 have opened it, commandments bound on the fingers and written on the table of the heart, and the bench reads the repetition as intentional rather than tired: a son does not learn this once. Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister makes the safeguard relational, a kinship claimed on wisdom before the stranger's flattery ever arrives, so that the whole chapter's warning is framed before the chapter's story begins. The purpose is stated plainly at verse 5, that they may keep thee from the strange woman, and everything that follows is the case for why the guard is needed.

Proverbs 7:6-9

at the window of my house I looked: The father becomes an eyewitness at his own casement, and what he sees is named without softening: a young man void of understanding, passing near her corner at the hour the text itself lingers over, the twilight, the evening, the black and dark night. Gill and Bridges both mark the route as the young man's own choice; he is not ambushed on a public road but walks the way to her house, so the fault the chapter charges is the walking, not only what waits at the end of it. The failing named is understanding withheld, not innocence removed by force.

Proverbs 7:10-15

Her attire and her heart are named together, harlot's dress and a subtil heart, and the parenthesis of verses 11 and 12 stops the story to diagnose her before she speaks a word: loud, stubborn, never at home, waiting at every corner. Her opening speech in verses 14 and 15 claims religious cover, peace offerings paid that very day, which the older commentators take as the sacrificial meal a worshipper was permitted to eat and share, so that piety itself becomes the pretext for the meeting. The bench reads the invitation to a shared peace-offering meal as the worst kind of camouflage, holy language used to open a door that should stay shut.

Proverbs 7:16-20

I have decked my bed with coverings: The speech turns from religious pretext to sensory inventory, Egyptian linen, myrrh and cinnamon, an appeal built entirely on the furnishing of a room rather than on anything true about the man she addresses. Her closing argument in verses 19 and 20 is logistics: the goodman is away and far off, the money bag is taken with him, the return date is fixed, so the danger she is selling is calculated safety. Bridges notes that every clause of her speech answers an objection the young man has not yet raised, which is itself the mark of a seasoned approach rather than a chance meeting.

Proverbs 7:21-23

The narrative gives its verdict in one stroke, he goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, an animal walking toward its own death without the capacity to read the sign. Henry pairs the ox with the bird of verse 23, hasting to the snare and not knowing that it is for his life, and reads both figures the same way: the fall is not sudden ignorance of danger but a failure to connect a known danger to himself in the moment it matters. Till a dart strike through his liver names a wound, not a pleasure, and the older writers take the liver as the seat of the passions the sin itself corrupts.

Proverbs 7:24-27

The father closes by widening the address from my son to O ye children, turning one man's story into a standing warning for every reader who has watched it. She hath cast down many wounded, yea many strong men have been slain by her insists that strength is no defense here, which the commentators take as the chapter's final correction to any reader tempted to think the young man's fault was only weakness. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death closes the chapter on the same word the whole book opened with, life against death, the choice the son was always making.