Proverbs 5

1✦My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding:

2✦That thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy lips may keep knowledge.

3✦For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:

4✦But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

5✦Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.

6✦Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.

7✦Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my mouth.

8✦Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house:

9✦Lest thou give thine honour unto others, and thy years unto the cruel:

10✦Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a stranger;

11✦And thou mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed,

12✦And say, How have I hated instruction, and my heart despised reproof;

13✦And have not obeyed the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me!

14✦I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly.

15✦Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well.

16✦Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets.

17Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee.

18✦Let 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.

20✦And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?

21✦For the ways of man are before the eyes of the LORD, and he pondereth all his goings.

22✦His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins.

23✦He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.