Chapter 5 is the first chapter in Proverbs given almost entirely to a single subject: adultery and its consequences. The warning begins with a description of the strange woman , her lips drop as a honeycomb, her mouth is smoother than oil. But then the turn: her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. And there is a specific mechanism to her danger: her ways are moveable, shifting and unstable, so that you cannot track where they lead , and while you are distracted trying to follow her, you never stop to ponder the path of your own life.
The warning is addressed again to a plural audience , "hear me now therefore, O ye children" , and it is economic and physical as much as moral. Yield to her and you give your honor to others and your years to the cruel. Strangers will be filled with your wealth. Your labors will go into another man's house. Your flesh and your body will be consumed. And then , in one of the most striking passages in the chapter , the person at the end of his life looks back and speaks: "How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof; and have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly." The regret is total. The failure is public. The self-condemnation is precise: I hated instruction, I despised reproof, I would not listen.
Against this the father sets an alternative. Drink waters out of your own cistern. Let your fountains , the children born of your union , be dispersed abroad in the streets, your own and not strangers'. Rejoice with the wife of your youth. Let her satisfy you; be ravished always with her love. Why pursue a stranger when this is available?
The chapter closes with a theological grounding for all of it: the ways of a man are before the eyes of the LORD, who ponders all his goings. There is nowhere to hide. His own iniquities will take the wicked, and he shall be held fast with the cords of his sins. He shall die without instruction , that phrase is the final verdict , and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
Next, Solomon turns from adultery to money traps: do not put up security for a neighbor's debt, do not shake hands for a stranger, and go to the ant to learn what steady work produces. Laziness, violence, and the seven things the LORD hates all compound into poverty and shame..
