13 The woman Folly is loud;
she is seductive and knows nothing.
14 She sits at the door of her house;
she takes a seat on the highest places of the town,
15 calling to those who pass by,
who are going straight on their way,
16 “Whoever is simple, let him turn in here!”
And to him who lacks sense she says,
17 “Stolen water is sweet,
and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.”
18 But he does not know that the dead are there,
that her guests are in the depths of Sheol.
Folly is here personified as the harlot of chapter 7. It is interesting that this want of understanding is imputed to the woman as well as to her hapless victims. This is worth remembering. For all its cunning and subtlety, there is a basic stupidity about evil for which wisdom can prove an effectual corrective and protection. We should note particularly the nature of the appeal in 17: it is to experience, to sensation, to feeling and instinct. Reason can say 'No' to this; reason can say, 'This is not true'; but alas, reason's voice is often unheeded. The particular emphasis of the words of this verse seem to imply that sinful ways are much more attractive in the imagination than they turn out to be in reality. Is not this something that we repeatedly prove in experience? Eve must have taken the forbidden fruit a dozen times in her imagination before she stretched out her hand for it. It is the imagination that proves so enticing. Is not this the deceitfulness of sin, beguiling people with a lie, glamorising it and them, and duping them into its clutches, when they find that the realisation is never so satisfying as the imagination of it promised. So they indulge in it again and again, and are never satisfied. Well might Hebrews 11:25 speak of the pleasures of sin for a season: the season is very short indeed, so short sometimes as to be momentary and fleeting; then it is gone forever, leaving nothing but dreary frustration and distemper, and gnawing depths of despair. There are some hells that begin before death (18).