Polyglot Bible: Proverbs: Proverbs 7

This is a synoptic presentation of Proverbs 7 in four parallel ancient versions — the King James Version (with Strong's concordance numbers), the Septuagint (Greek), the Masoretic Hebrew (Tanakh), and the Latin Vulgate — belonging to the wisdom literature tradition of the Hebrew Bible. The chapter takes the form of a father's urgent warning to his son: keep wisdom's commandments close, treat Wisdom herself as a sister and intimate companion, so that she may guard you against the "strange woman." The bulk of the text is a vivid dramatic narrative in which the father, watching from his window, observes a naive young man wandering into a seductress's neighborhood at nightfall; she intercepts him, kisses him, and entices him with perfumed bedsheets, Egyptian linen, peace-offering sacrifices already paid, and the convenient absence of her husband. The young man follows her to his ruin, compared in all four versions to an ox led to slaughter, a bird flying into a snare, and a deer struck through the liver by an arrow. The chapter closes by circling back to the father's exhortation: her house is the road to Sheol, its rooms the chambers of death. The distinctive feature of this presentation is the side-by-side display of the four textual traditions, allowing readers to compare how each version renders the same metaphors and moral stakes — of particular interest to students of biblical philology, translation history, or textual criticism.

Polyglot Bible: Proverbs: Proverbs 7

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