Proverbs 7:25

Verse 24 follows straight on from the story of Proverbs 7:6–23. There a young man void of understanding meets the strange woman, is won over by her flattering words, and goes after her to his ruin. Now the father turns from the story to the ones he is teaching. “Now therefore” draws the lesson out of it: in the light of what they have just heard, listening is the only sensible answer, because the stakes are life and death. The chapter began with the same appeal, asking the son to keep his father’s commandments and treasure them as the apple of his eye (Proverbs 7:1–5). The whole of Proverbs 1–9 is built on a father pleading with his son to take hold of wisdom, as he does at length in Proverbs 4.

“Hearken” is shâmaʻ, to hear with understanding. In Scripture hearing of this kind goes on to obey what it hears, above all when the voice is God’s, and Israel’s confession of faith opens with the same call to hear: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). “Attend” is qâshab, to listen attentively, literally to incline the ears, and the father puts the two commands side by side so that the second presses the first home. What the children are to attend to is “the words of my mouth”. The word ʼêmer is something said, a word or a saying, and peh is the mouth. The father is asking them to take in what he has said aloud to them.

Both commands ask for hearing that ends in doing. James puts it this way: “But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves” (James 1:22). The blessed man of the first psalm delights in the law of the LORD and meditates on it day and night, and he is like a tree planted by the rivers of water that brings forth its fruit in its season (Psalm 1:1–3). The father’s plea comes from the same love God shows when he calls his people away from the paths that destroy them and toward his own life-giving ways.

Verse 25 gives the two commands that the whole chapter has been leading to. The first is about the heart. In Hebrew the heart, lêb, is the whole inner person: the mind, the will, the feelings and the conscience, the place where thoughts, intentions and decisions are formed. “Decline” is sâṭâh, to turn aside or go astray. The law of Numbers 5 uses this verb of a wife who is unfaithful to her husband, which makes it a fitting word for a heart that turns toward an adulteress. The father knows that the danger starts inside, with desires and thoughts that lean toward her before a single step is taken. Proverbs says the same in its best-known line about the heart: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23). Jesus taught it too: “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19).

The second command is about the feet. “Go astray” is tâʻâh, to wander, to stray, to lose one’s way, often through being deceived, which suits a woman whose weapon is flattering speech. The two lines say one warning twice, as Hebrew poetry often does, and together they cover the inner life and the outward walk. Her “ways” are derek, the road or general course of a life, and her “paths” are nâthîyb, tracks worn by use. Between them they take in the whole manner of life she stands for, with its habits, its places and its company.

So the wise course is to stay off her paths altogether and keep away from the places and friendships that lead toward her. Paul gives the same counsel in two words: “Flee fornication” (1 Corinthians 6:18). Jesus speaks of a wide gate and a broad way that lead to destruction, and a strait gate and a narrow way that lead to life (Matthew 7:13–14), and this verse stands where the two roads part.

Verse 26 gives the reason for the commands, and it speaks the language of the battlefield. “Cast down” is nâphal, to fall, here in the form that means to cause to fall, to throw down. “Wounded” is châlâl, which means pierced, slain, mortally wounded, so the KJV’s “wounded” describes the fallen who lie dead. The same word can also mean profaned or dishonoured, which is a separate sense, and here the meaning is slain. The Hebrew for “many wounded” is rabbîm ḥalālîm, “many slain”. The word “yea” stands for the small Hebrew joining word wĕ, and it brings in a second line that raises the stakes.

That second line names “many strong men”, waʿăṣûmîm. The word ʿăṣûmîm means the mighty, people of strength and standing. “Slain” is hărûgêhā, from hârag, to kill, a word that leaves no doubt about the outcome. She has brought down the strong as well as the simple, and her victims are many. Strength, reputation and experience give no protection. “He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered” (Proverbs 28:26). The man who thinks himself too strong to fall is the one most in need of God’s wisdom and God’s help.

The ruin is real, and it reaches every part of life: the body, the purse, the good name, the household and the soul. Proverbs says so plainly elsewhere. Her lips drop as an honeycomb, “But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword”, and the man who goes to her mourns at the last, when his flesh and his body are consumed (Proverbs 5:3–14). “Can a man take fire in his bosom, and his clothes not be burned?” (Proverbs 6:26–29). Of those who go to her it says, “None that go unto her return again, neither take they hold of the paths of life” (Proverbs 2:18–19). The path of the just shines more and more, while “The way of the wicked is as darkness: they know not at what they stumble” (Proverbs 4:18–19).

Sin has worked this way from the beginning, promising good and bringing death, as it did in the garden (Genesis 3). James traces the same steps: “But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:14–15).

Verse 27 ends the chapter by showing where her road leads. “House” is bayith, a dwelling. It is her real house, the one she leads the young man to, and it also stands for her whole world: her way of life, her values and her hold over all who come in. “Way” is derek, a road and also the course of a life. Her house is the road itself, and the road runs downhill. “Going down” is yârad, to descend, and the descent continues until it reaches “the chambers of death”. The Hebrew is chadrei-mavet, from cheder, an inner room or private chamber, and maveth, death. The picture is of the innermost rooms of death, an enclosed place with no way back out.

Proverbs has said this before. Chapter 2 warned, “For her house inclineth unto death, and her paths unto the dead”, and the house of Folly in chapter 9 is the same: “But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell” (Proverbs 9:18). Her house looks inviting and the road feels pleasant, which is why the warning is so stark. “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12).

Paul asks what fruit came of the things believers are now ashamed of, “for the end of those things is death” (Romans 6:21), and he sums it up: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). The first psalm closes on the same two roads: “For the LORD knoweth the way of the righteous: but the way of the ungodly shall perish” (Psalm 1:6).

The father in Proverbs pleads with his children to listen for their lives. Paul calls Christ “the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1 Corinthians 1:24), and in him the Wisdom who calls out in Proverbs 8, present with God from the beginning, comes to us in person. Jesus called people again and again to hear his words, and he said, “the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life” (John 6:63). When many turned away, Peter answered, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). To continue in his word is to know the truth that makes us free (John 8:31–32), and the one who hears his sayings and does them builds his house on a rock that stands through the storm (Matthew 7:24–27).

Her house is “the way to hell”, and Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). Verse 25 warns against a heart that turns aside, and Jesus is the one whose heart stayed true. He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Verse 26 counts the many who lie slain, and Scripture says that every one of us has walked her kind of road: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). In the KJV the same English word describes Christ himself: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). He went down into death for us, and by his cross he spoiled principalities and powers and made a show of them openly (Colossians 2:15). So for those who are in him, “There is therefore now no condemnation” (Romans 8:1), and the death that waits at the end of her road is a defeated enemy: “The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26).

These four verses give us a father’s warning, and the warning is itself a kindness. He tells the hard truth about where the strange woman’s house leads because he wants his children to live, and in this we see God’s own heart toward us. He names the end of sin plainly so that we can see it before the first step, unlike the young man who went after her “as an ox goeth to the slaughter” (Proverbs 7:22).

The passage also shows that God looks at the heart. The battle is won or lost first in what we love and think about, so his word speaks to our desires before it speaks to our feet, and it teaches us that the strong fall too, ourselves included.

And it sets two roads before us. One goes down from her door to the chambers of death. The other is the way of the righteous that the LORD knows, the path of the just that shines more and more unto the perfect day, and it has a name, for Christ calls himself the Way. The father’s “Hearken unto me now” still sounds for every child of God who reads it, with the same love and the same hope that we will live.