In the father’s admonitions in Proverbs 1–4 the threat of the “foreign” or “forbidden” woman is mentioned only briefly (2:16–19). In chapters 5–9 this woman takes center stage alongside the wife, Woman Wisdom, and Dame Folly. The Introduction highlighted the fact that over half of the verses in chapters 1–9 contain feminine imagery, mostly sexual, even though this is probably out of proportion to the range of temptations that will face the son as he begins his journey to manhood. In fact, based on a count of themes in all thirty-one chapters, Proverbs is far more concerned with sloth than with sexual behavior.

So why is there so much concern with feminine themes here? Given the symbolic emphasis on the two ways, it seems likely that the density of allusions to women is meant to reinforce the guiding role of the desires in our pursuit of wisdom. (This will be taken up in the Response section.)

This chapter also contains the only direct comparison between the dangers of the “foreign” woman and the delights of a good wife or spouse. It also contains the highest density of sayings in Proverbs that imagine intense pleasure. Later, chapters 25–26 will contain the highest density of sayings imagining intense pain. As we will see in due course, the location of these pleasure and pain sayings does not appear to be random or accidental in the least. We will also begin to see in later chapters that the writers of Proverbs were adept in their use of pain, pleasure, and the imagination in communicating the essentials about a life of wisdom.

  I.J.  Seventh Instruction (5:1–23)

1.  Wisdom, Words, and the Dangers of the Strange Woman (5:1–6)

2.  The Foreign Woman: Sweet on the Surface, Destruction Below (5:7–14)

3.  Delight in the Wife’s Flowing Pleasures (5:15–20)

4.  Final Warnings and Consequences (5:21–23)

Wisdom and the Modern University

In his 2004 novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Tom Wolfe depicts the social and cultural inner-workings of today’s elite university campuses. We typically know these schools from their brilliant towers of gothic architecture interwoven with pristine gardens, their self-portraits as strongholds of the finest learning and research, their unequalled portals to self-discovery, and their unique potential to create the change of the world of tomorrow.

Notwithstanding the real academic work being done on these campuses by a select few, Wolfe’s novel exposes the campus culture beneath the surface as an interwoven construct of competitive social hierarchies, professional networks, unconstrained sports mania, and alcohol-laden festivals of indiscriminate sex and licentious behavior. Co-ed dorms that promise an ethos of equality and diverse living in reality erase all normal barriers of modesty and difference. Virtually all moral horizons are flattened out to allow for unbounded exploratory learning. Ashley Downs, the resident assistant in Wolfe’s fictional dormitory, Edgerton House, welcomes the new students with the caveat, “The university no longer plays the role of parent . . . you’re on your own.”60

Most parents of college-bound children today probably hope there will be some way to avoid sending their young ones into this world. And yet, in truth, 80 percent of children from Christian homes will attend secular colleges of this sort. Not to mention the fact that most Christian colleges reflect this culture in one way or another.61 What should parents and their children do?

Obviously there are no cookie-cutter solutions to these kinds of moral complexities. But that is exactly the context wisdom is meant to address. We should, therefore, reflect for a moment on the way in which Proverbs speaks to the moral challenges of its day.

First, rather than avoiding the topics of sexual and other physical pleasures, or else moralizing about them, Proverbs addresses these pleasures freely. The father openly concedes the temptations offered by the “foreign woman.”

Second, the father uses the imaginative world of poetry to depict the shame, ruin, and pain that will result upon succumbing to such an ill-chosen path of life—especially with the metaphors of bitter wormwood and the double-mouthed sword, as well as physical descriptions of pain and groaning in 5:10–11. In chapter 25–26 we will see that our minds (the somato-sensory cortex and amygdala, specifically) elicit empathic responses to images of pain and pleasure. In other words, we have an involuntary, embodied response of pain when we hear about or picture pain inflicted on another. It should be easy to imagine the benefit this has for instilling these sayings into the memory and reinforcing a pattern of avoidance, just as we learn to avoid touching a hot stove.62

Finally, the father’s sayings use provocative images to encourage his son to enjoy sexual pleasures within married life. The poetry provides a buffer space for talking about sex, avoiding literal descriptions of anatomy or physiological processes. Sex imagined in this way is just as inviting and playful as that of the foreign woman, only better and ultimately life-saving.

Whereas we might think of poetic images as relics of ancient and primitive times, modern neuroscience reveals that they actually have a remarkable power to shape ethical behavior.

Reading Proverbs Alongside Ecclesiastes

As already noted, sexuality is a favorite topic in Proverbs 1–9 not simply in order to address sexual temptation but for the very reason that the desire of Eros best describes the whole effort to live a wise life.63

In this light the comment on 5:1–6 [at v. 4] highlighted in Ecclesiastes the Preacher’s references to women in his description of his failed search for wisdom. Two women, to be exact: one “more bitter than death” that he found (7:26) and one whom he did not find, even among a large group (7:28). This might strike us as a complex and obscure way to talk—and it is. But it is less so if we know the context of the search for wisdom and the two types of women that dominate Proverbs 1–9. These connections between wisdom and two women are a major clue not only to understanding Ecclesiastes but, even more, to the search for wisdom more broadly.

Despite a very different tone or attitude from that of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes holds much in common with proverbial wisdom. Both books are about the search for wisdom. Both contain poems and terse, memorable sayings. Also, as in Proverbs 5:15–19, the Preacher advises us to find pleasure in marital intimacy (Eccles. 9:9) as well as in the satisfaction of work and the gift of food (Eccles. 2:24; 3:12–13, 22; etc.).

But the Preacher is unable to sustain the joy and optimism that pervades Proverbs. The book leaves us three major clues to help us understand the Preacher’s tendency to despair and pessimism. First, the Preacher’s search for wisdom is limited almost entirely to his individual, hyperrational way of thinking (epistemology). For example, first-person pronouns and verbs appear with far greater frequency in Ecclesiastes than in any other book in the OT (“I saw,” “I said,” “I looked,” “I have seen,” etc.).

The second clue to the Preacher’s despair is found in his allusion to cosmic evil. The Preacher goes in search of wisdom only to discover a “bitter” woman, “whose heart is snares and nets and whose hands are fetters.” She is a striking parallel to the evil woman in Proverbs 5 who is “bitter as wormwood” and whose “feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol” (5:4–5) Notably, this is the narrator’s sole interruption into the Preacher’s voice between Ecclesiastes 1:1 and 12:9; when he says, “Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher” (Eccles. 7:27), he points conspicuously to the pervasive force of evil (forbidden Eros) in the search for wisdom.

A third clue comes in the Preacher’s closing admonition, “Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth” (Eccles. 12:1). By this he does not mean simply that he forgot God, as we do with an item on a shopping list. The Preacher failed to “remember” the Giver of all good gifts in the same sense that Proverbs 1–9 and Deuteronomy use the term “remember” to designate our renewed devotion to the Creator and his sovereignty over creation. In a comprehensive way, then, the Preacher’s life has turned inward, abandoned the habits of religious devotion to his maker, and found his desires drawn to evil.

Paul tells us that in the fall God gave us over to a “debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (Rom. 1:28). In Romans 7 Paul goes on to describe the conflict between the two resulting desires and the two ways of life “waging war” within us (Rom. 7:23). The grip of the fall is a wandering desire that fractures our knowledge of what is true and good.

The good news proclaims Christ Jesus, who comes with power to rescue us from this battle of desire (Rom. 7:25) and to renew our minds (12:2) to new knowledge of God and his world order. This work of redemption and renewal, as Oliver O’Donovan observes, comes about by a desiring embrace: “There can be no true knowledge of that order without loving acceptance of it and conformity to it.”64 James K. A. Smith puts it this way when he writes, “Discipleship is rehabituation of your loves,” grounded in an “erotic telos (end) in the Creator himself.”65

This is why “the fear of Yahweh” as the starting point for wisdom is not just shorthand for “holy living.” To fear Yahweh is an act of daily pervasive submission of the whole of our being to the path he has laid for us. To fear him is to love him and desire his will for us above all else (cf. Deut. 10:12). This should help us appreciate that the most important questions in parenting, counseling, and friendship are not about what we are thinking or feeling but, beneath those, what we are most desiring and loving, because our thoughts and feelings are always reflections of our deepest loves and affections.Proverbs 5

Proverbs 6