10 for wisdom will come into your heart,
and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul;
11 discretion will watch over you,
understanding will guard you,
12 delivering you from the way of evil,
from men of perverted speech,
13 who forsake the paths of uprightness
to walk in the ways of darkness,
14 who rejoice in doing evil
and delight in the perverseness of evil,
15 men whose paths are crooked,
and who are devious in their ways.
16 So you will be delivered from the forbidden[a] woman,
from the adulteress[b] with her smooth words,
17 who forsakes the companion of her youth
and forgets the covenant of her God;
18 for her house sinks down to death,
and her paths to the departed;[c]
19 none who go to her come back,
nor do they regain the paths of life.
20 So you will walk in the way of the good
and keep to the paths of the righteous.
21 For the upright will inhabit the land,
and those with integrity will remain in it,
22 but the wicked will be cut off from the land,
and the treacherous will be rooted out of it.
Such is the good (10, 11) that wisdom brings; we look, in what follows these vers- es, at the evil it prevents. Two dangers are spoken of here, and a twofold deliverance is promised, deliverance from the way of the evil man (12-15), and deliverance from the way of the 'strange' woman (16-19). Wisdom makes us into a certain kind of person, to whom the talk, and the way of life, of evil and godless men will be unattractive and in- deed foreign. The integrity of which the passage speaks will put a circle round us, to pre- serve us from the devious, twisted and perverse attitudes that are so much the hallmark and characteristic of godlessness. Nothing so effectively separates the believer from the unbeliever as this; there is the distinct and marked consciousness of belonging literally to another world, so different are the respective sets of values. The second deliverance is from the strange woman. The term 'strange woman' has the force of 'one who is outside the circle of a man's proper relations, that is a harlot or an adulteress', and here, the lat- ter, for 17 refers to her husband ('the guide of her youth'). The 'covenant' 17 which she has forgotten is not the marriage covenant as such, but the covenant with God expressed in the Ten Commandments, one of which - the seventh - she has explicitly broken by the way she is living. Once again, it is only integrity of life that can preserve a young man from such seductive danger. Only by being a certain kind of person can safety be en- sured. Character is what saves and keeps, and enables a man to stand firm. This is why, ultimately, there is no effective substitute in the Christian life for the practice of exposing one's mind and heart constantly and regularly to the teaching of Scripture - there is no other way for this kind of integrity of character to be forged.