8 Hold thy path far from her neighbourhood, And come not to the door of her house! 9 That thou mayest not give the freshness of thy youth to another, Nor thy years to the cruel one; 10 That strangers may not sate themselves with thy possessions, And the fruit of thy toils come into the house of a stranger, 11 And thou groanest at the end, When thy flesh and thy body are consumed.
Neither here nor in the further stages of this discourse is there any reference to the criminal punishment inflicted on the adulterer, which, according to Lev 20:10, consisted in death, according to Eze 16:40, cf. John. Pro 8:5, in stoning, and according to a later traditional law, in strangulation (חנק). Ewald finds in Pro 5:14 a play on this punishment of adultery prescribed by law, and reads from Pro 5:9. that the adulterer who is caught by the injured husband was reduced to the state of a slave, and was usually deprived of his manhood. But that any one should find pleasure in making the destroyer of his wife his slave is a far-fetched idea, and neither the law nor the history of Israel contains any evidence for this punishment by slavery or the mutilation of the adulterer, for which Ewald refers to Grimm's Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer. The figure which is here sketched by the poet is very different. He who goes into the net of the wanton woman loses his health and his goods. She stands not alone, but has her party with her, who wholly plunder the simpleton who goes into her trap. Nowhere is there any reference to the husband of the adulteress. The poet does not at all think on a married woman. And the word chosen directs our attention rather to a foreigner than to an Israelitish woman, although the author may look upon harlotry as such as heathenish rather than Israelitish, and designate it accordingly. The party of those who make prostitutes of themselves consists of their relations and their older favourites, the companions of their gain, who being in league with her exhaust the life-strength and the resources of the befooled youth (Fl.). This discourse begins with ועתּה, for it is connected by this concluding application (cf. Pro 7:24) with the preceding.
Verses 8-9
In Pro 5:8, one must think on such as make a gain of their impurity. מעל, Schultens remarks, with reference to Eze 23:18, crebrum in rescisso omni commercio: מן denotes the departure, and על the nearness, from which one must remove himself to a distance. Regarding הוד gn (Pro 5:9), which primarily, like our Pracht
