✧1My son, attend unto my wisdom, [and] bow thine ear to my understanding: ✧2That thou mayest regard discretion, and [that] thy lips may keep knowledge. ✧3For the lips of a strange woman drop [as] an honeycomb, and her mouth [is] smoother than oil: ✧4But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword. ✧5Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. ✧6Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, [that] thou canst not know [them]. ✧7Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth. ✧8Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house: ✧9Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel:
King James Version (KJV). King James Version (1769 text). Public domain outside the United Kingdom.
✧10Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours [be] in the house of a stranger;
✧11And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,
✧12And say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof;
✧13And have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me!
✧14I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly.
✧15Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.
✧16Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, [and] rivers of waters in the streets.
✧17Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee.
✧18Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth.
✧19[Let her be as] the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love.
✧20And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?
✧21For the ways of man [are] before the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings.
✧22His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.
✧23He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.