7:1–5 As notes, Proverbs 1–9 shares a heavy emphasis both on the commands and torah (law, instruction) of the father—echoing the law of Moses—and also on concerns regarding women and eros, an intense expression of human desire. These two emphases are not coincidental in the least. The appeal to Moses always grounds the parents’ instructions in the authority and traditions of biblical law and covenants. This covenant between God and his people is, meanwhile, often depicted through images of marriage, intimacy, and unfaithfulness and the good and errant desires of the Israelites. Verses 1–5 juxtapose these themes in an unmistakable way: obedience to commands and law protects the son from infidelity with the foreign woman (cf. 2:17). As noted in the comment on 6:24–35, the prophets also pair covenant faithfulness and erotic desire (Jer. 2:2, 13; 3:2–6; Ezek. 16:28, 32; Mal. 2:11–16).

As in Deuteronomy and Proverbs 2–6, the eyes, fingers, and heart all symbolize full and embodied devotion to the way of wisdom. Eyes bring to mind desire and our oft-dangerous moral freedoms. Fingers, like hands, point to our work and vocation. And the heart, as in 4:23, always stands for the center of our desire, reason, and conduct. Significantly, unlike our modern impulse to separate our religious devotion from our life in the world, the OT—particularly Proverbs and Deuteronomy—makes life in the world and life before God an indivisible whole.

Alongside the temptations of the foreign woman (Prov. 7:5) we find the personification of wisdom as a “sister” and “intimate friend” (v. 4), images that wonderfully display the unique breadth of wisdom’s appeal: she is a lover (3:18; 8:21, 31), of course, but also a mother (8:32), friend, and sister. This is in stark contrast to the singular and destructive sex appeal of the temptress.

7:6–9 My wife’s parents were fond of saying to their five children, “Nothing good happens after midnight,” a riff on the warning in these verses in Proverbs. Living on and near college campuses most of our adult lives, we have seen this wisdom confirmed time and again. Most of the sad, destructive, foolish, and evil things that happen to students occur while they should be asleep. Staying up late is one of the first ways that adolescents begin to test and assert their adulthood. And the father in this passage knows this all too well.

The flow of voices in the chapter is subtle, but it does seem as if these verses present the voice of the father. My students often assume that this father is reporting a personal experience from sometime in his past. But, as we follow the passage through, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the father left his house and managed to tag along as an unnoticed bystander of these events between the young man and the seductress. The point, of course, is that the father has experienced enough of life to know whence temptations will come when no one is looking. (Cf. the Response section.)

To implant this instruction in the son’s mind the father creatively ridicules the type of person this woman preys upon: the “simple,” “youths,” “young,” and those “lacking sense” (v. 7). One would have to be an idiot to fall for this. But idiots and the intelligent do fall, time and again.

7:10–13 Together with the next section (vv. 14–20) these verses depict a sexual encounter through the eyes and actions of the foreign woman. The scene complements the focus on the actions and motives of the naïve young man in 6:25–35.

This woman is a restless busybody, scurrying in every direction to hook her prey (7:11–13). As “guarded in heart” (v. 10 ESV mg.), the woman knows exactly what she is up to, and yet she keeps it hidden from the vulnerable young man, who wanders around at night with naïve and single-minded ambitions.

The woman is not only “at” the street corners but “beside” them (v. 12). Such positioning is an intentional contrast to Woman Wisdom, who sits “beside” Yahweh during his work of creation (8:30). One woman’s devotion is set on ruining lives at the seedy places of the night; the other sits in wondered delight before the Divine Artist working away at the easel of the universe.

7:14–20 It is easy to miss the sly transition here from the father’s words of warning to his provocative impersonation of the foreign woman. Yet, if we remain alert readers at this point, we come to appreciate the great skill in the hand that penned this passage—akin to the best of dramatic writing in other eras.

The passage opens with the woman’s loosely referring to the fact that she has just come from offering “sacrifices” and paying “vows.” Scholars offer several possible meanings. Is she attempting to cover the guilt of a licentious sexual life? Or is the point that she has her own money and that her husband is not a worry? Might she be alluding to the law in Leviticus 7:15–16 to suggest that she has a meal to go along with the sexual pleasures she offers? Or is this a clever nod to the tryst between Judah and Tamar at the sacred sheep-shearing festival in Genesis 38? The fact the scholars cannot agree is telling in itself. The ambiguity wrought by this skillful writer sends our minds in countless directions all the while drawing them into the plot that unfolds before us.

A great urgency in this scene arises from the verbs describing the woman’s activity (“have come out,” “seek you eagerly,” “have found you”). These descriptions imagine an intensity of effort that stands in direct contrast to the son’s need to follow, seek, and find wisdom (Prov. 2:4–5; 3:13; 8:17; cf. 1:28)—an effort, if heeded, that would lead him away from the grasp of his pursuer.

The foreign woman has adorned the bed with expensive linens and surrounded it with aromatic spices. The “Egyptian linen” (7:16) may very well be an allusion to Potiphar’s wife. This is especially likely given the second major description of the love scene: the absence of a husband, just as with Potiphar’s absence in Genesis (vv. 18–19; cf. Gen. 39:7–18). Between the description of the bed and the safety of a scene with the woman alone lies the central verse and its seductive description of a long night of passionate lovemaking (Prov. 7:18). Everything about this is as imaginatively appealing as it should be morally repulsive.

7:21–23 Just as the son reaches the peak of imagined rapture, the father breaks in with a harsh picture of the consequences that come to a man seduced by the woman’s offerings. Such a sharp transition ends his impersonation of the seductress and puts the son back into the context of life in the real world. In exchange for brief sensual pleasures the son knows he will suffer the same fate as an ox being butchered or a deer caught in a trap until “an arrow pierces its liver”—in short, blood, pain, and death.

In the comments above we saw that chapters 5–7 contain the highest density of sayings that imagine pain alongside intense pleasure. Here in chapter 7 we find a contrast between the sights, smells, and safety of licentious sexuality and the helpless suffering of animals at the hands of herders and hunters. In a world without television, film, or video games, this was about as intense as it got.

The point, of course, is not mere entertainment but the construction of a moral framework within the community. When any culture (such as ours today) favors unlimited sensual and personal freedom and choice above a fixed moral order, dire consequences will most certainly follow. If everyone does what is right in his own eyes, as the book of Judges observes, culture dissolves into anarchy and chaos.

7:24–27 Proverbs 7 closes with a final appeal from the father that closely parallels the language in the opening speech of verses 1–5. Table 2.5 shows just a few examples of the symmetry between the two addresses. Just as the “words” and “commands” of Moses in Deuteronomy promise long life in the land, so do the father’s words in Proverbs offer the son the means to a successful passage to life through a fallen and dangerous world. The plural “sons” repeats the same plural address in 4:1; 7:24 (cf. 8:32), serving as a subtle reminder that we are not alone as we face the appeals of wisdom and folly.

TABLE 2.5: Symmetry between Speeches in 7:1–5 and 7:24–27

The image of the “chambers of death” depicts a house that collects and stores the dead and the foolish. The image, along with the reference to Sheol (the “grave”; 7:27), reminds us that the son’s actions will have cosmic consequences. To violate the father’s moral commands means a rejection of the created order and consequences that are both severe and eternal.