✧My 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: ✧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.