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NOTES for Pro 7:1-27

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1 My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.
2 Keep my commandments, and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye.
3 Bind them upon thy fingers, write them upon the table of thine heart.
4 Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman:
5 That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth with her words.
6 For at the window of my house I looked through my casement,
7 And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding,
8 Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house,
9 In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night:
10 And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart.
11 (She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house:
12 Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.)
13 So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him,
14 I have peace offerings with me; this day have I payed my vows.
15 Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee.
16 I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt.
17 I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.
18 Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves.
19 For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey:
20 He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed.
21 With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him.
22 He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks;
23 Till a dart strike through his liver; as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life.
24 Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth.
25 Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths.
26 For she hath cast down many wounded: yea, many strong men have been slain by her.
27 Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death.
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In our age of permissive morals, the cautionary tale of the treachery of another man's wife may seem naive. Yet it is worth considering that adultery is not portrayed by chance as an image of evil that goes beyond ordinary human relations, and that apostasy is associated precisely with this sin. Nor is the matter simply that we have too readily agreed to call something else “love.” It is no coincidence that the woman hunting for young men has covered her bed with Egyptian linen, recalling the land where the people were enslaved. Whoever falls under her power becomes a slave, senselessly squandering his spiritual strength in bondage to his own illusions. We should use the word “love,” one of the descriptions of God, with greater care...

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For Pro 7:1
1 My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee.
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"My son, keep your father's commandment, and do not reject your mother's teaching..." When we were little, we sometimes thought...  Read more

"My son, keep your father's commandment, and do not reject your mother's teaching..." When we were little, we sometimes thought: when I grow up, I will not have to obey Mom and Dad; I will be an adult, I will do what I want, and I will eat a whole mountain of candy at once. Then we grow up, and we no longer want a mountain of candy; we do not even want one piece, but we want something else. And again it turns out that we cannot. So where is that vaunted freedom?..

Here is what the well-known Protestant thinker of the middle of the last century, Karl Barth, writes: "freedom can be defined as a person's independence from any inner compulsion." In reality it turns out to be the opposite: it is not what cuts us off from the object of our desire that deprives us of freedom, but this very desire, arising within us, that becomes the cause of our suffering and deprives us of the blessed freedom to be ourselves. This puts everything in its place. But still, what are we to do with these endless external limits, all the way to the limit of the very span of our life? Okudzhava once put it wonderfully: "The whole world is made of limits, / So happiness will not drive us mad". Ironic, funny? In fact, very deep.

Here is what Barth writes: "The fact that limits are given to us does not testify to the imperfection of the world; limits are not the chains of an evil fate. We are given the freedom to know what we are permitted to know, to accomplish what we are permitted to accomplish. In this freedom is God's will, God's blessing to His creation." But why was it God's will that we should suffer from the unrealized state of our desires? So that happiness would not drive us mad. The ancient Romans also said: "whom Jupiter wishes to destroy, he deprives of reason." But God certainly does not want to destroy us.


"From my youth many passions war against me,
but You Yourself defend me and save me, my Savior"
(Antiphon, Tone 4)

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