Two Invitations, Two Destinies — Proverbs

Chapter 9 is the final chapter of the father's extended discourses and it closes with a deliberate symmetry: two women, two houses, two invitations, two destinies.

Wisdom has built her house and hewn out its seven pillars , seven being the number of completeness. She has killed her beasts, mingled her wine, furnished her table. She sends her maidens to cry from the highest places of the city, and the invitation goes to the simple and those who lack understanding: come, eat of my bread, drink of the wine I have mixed. Forsake the foolish and live; go in the way of understanding.

Between the two invitations, the chapter inserts a crucial observation about who can actually be helped. If you reprove a scorner, you get shame for yourself. If you rebuke a wicked man, you earn his hostility. Do not reprove a scorner , he will hate you. But rebuke a wise man and he will love you for it. Give instruction to a wise man and he becomes wiser; teach a just man and he grows. The point is precise: wisdom and correction are not equally useful to everyone. The scorner cannot be improved by instruction , he reacts against it. The wise man can be improved and knows it. Then the chapter restates the book's central declaration: the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the holy is understanding. And a consequence follows: if you are wise, you are wise for yourself. If you scorn, you alone bear it. The benefits and costs are personal , they fall on the person who chooses.

Then the counterimage. The foolish woman is clamorous and simple and knows nothing. She does not build a house , she sits at the door of hers, on a seat in the high places of the city. But notice who she calls: not the lost or the wandering, but those who are already going right on their ways. She targets people already on the right path and tries to divert them. Her invitation uses the same words as Wisdom's: whoso is simple, let him turn in here. But her offer is different: stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant. The appeal is to transgression itself, to the pleasure of the forbidden.

The man who turns in does not know what he is entering. The dead are there. Her guests are in the depths of hell.