Daily Bible Study: Proverbs 2:16-22

To deliver you from the immoral woman,
From the seductress who flatters with her words,
Who forsakes the companion of her youth,
And forgets the covenant of her God.
For her house leads down to death,
And her paths to the dead;
None who go to her return,
Nor do they regain the paths of life—
So you may walk in the way of goodness,
And keep to the paths of righteousness.
For the upright will dwell in the land,
And the blameless will remain in it;
But the wicked will be cut off from the earth,
And the unfaithful will be uprooted from it.

Proverbs 2:16-22 (NKJV).

Wisdom is spoken of like a woman, and when contrasted to the results of a relationship with an immoral woman, the choice to anthropomorphize wisdom as a woman makes a bit more sense. Solomon is a king, his son is a prince, and as a result of the naturally high social status he would attract attention from women of all types despite personality flaws.

The dynamic of his affections being competed for by various companions would be intimately familiar, as well as the requirement to teach what he should be looking for in those relationships.

Yet if you look at the flaws of the immoral woman, you'll notice a similarity between her and the stereotype of the "modern man". The regular, run-of-the-mill, often "creepy", modern man who is likely presumed to be obsessed with some pastime people think he should have left in his childhood.

This is not accidental, as the modern man has been told for many decades that he is to act more like a woman, to deny God's calling in his life, to deny God's design in creating him as a man, that the result of these denials would create "equality" between men and women in the material sense, and finally that they would then increase their mating success as well.

The problem is that men are inherently idealistic about relationships with women, and women are inherently pragmatic about relationships with men, but nobody wants to admit this to themselves, let alone in the public discourse. What this means is that for the same reason men sing love songs, write poetry, and make total fools of themselves over women, they would fall prey to the empty flattery of an immoral woman pretending to be the one who can satisfy these fantasies for him.

The reality is that she just sees him as a means to an end, and his ideals are only fodder for mundane conversation, and as soon as he has lost whatever status or wealth that can be made of use to her, she'll immediately jump ship and start looking for a replacement, if she wasn't already entertaining one in secret. The modern divorce rate is between 40-50%, but how often is that paired with the fact that almost 70% of divorces are also initiated by wives?

The modern man invests himself emotionally into the immoral woman, and tries to be like her, in hopes that by mimicking her, she would be comfortable and stay with him. This doesn't really work because the behavior patterns he is trying to copy are a fitness test put on by her to determine whether the man in front of her is actually a suitable mate or not. They are a ploy, a scheme, and so in failing to see past this, he fails the test and is significantly downgraded in value.

This is why the seduction of the immoral woman is cited by Solomon as being so damaging, because the ruinous results of such relationships are evident all around us. Even men who survive are still marred by that relationship, changed forever by it.

When a divorce occurs and resources are split up, families broken, homes torn apart, that is a damage which cannot be recovered from. It can be survived and you can rebuild, but even that is still just a reaction to the original relationship. It never ceases to be a part of the context of that man's life.

To stay on the path of wisdom means to see through flattery and deceit to the truth of a relationship, in the case of this passage, to see beyond the words of the immoral woman to know what the realities are, and making decisions based on truth and reality instead of idealism. This is difficult for a man who has not courted wisdom, who has not pursued her, and has not internalized the truths she shares.

To pursue wisdom is to shun the tempting lies of foolishness. The righteous will build a legacy in honesty and truth. Fools will be betrayed by their empty ideals and left with nothing. Do not be a fool.