1
When you sit to eat with a ruler, consider carefully what is before you.
2
And put a knife to your throat if you are a master of appetite.
3
Do not desire his delicacies, for they are bread of deception.
4
Do not weary yourself to become rich. From your own understanding, cease.
5
Will you cause your eyes to fly toward what is nothing? For wealth surely makes wings for itself and flies toward the heavens like an eagle.
6
Do not eat the bread of one with an evil eye, and do not desire his delicacies.
7
For as he calculates within his being, so is he. “Eat and drink,” he says to you, but his heart is not with you.
8
The morsel you have eaten you shall vomit up, and you shall waste your pleasant words.
9
Do not speak in the ears of a fool, for he shall despise the wisdom of your words.
10
Do not move the ancient boundary marker, and do not enter the fields of the fatherless.
11
For their Redeemer is strong. He Himself will contend their controversy with you.
12
Bring your heart to discipline, and your ears to words of knowledge.
13
Do not withhold discipline from a child. If you strike him with the rod, he shall not die.
14
You shall strike him with the rod and deliver his being from Sheol.
15
My son, if your heart becomes wise, my heart— even mine— shall rejoice.
16
And my inward parts shall rejoice when your lips speak upright things.
17
Do not let your heart envy sinners, but remain in the fear of Yahuah all the day.
18
For surely there is an end, and your hope shall not be cut off.
19
Hear, my son, and become wise, and guide your heart in the way.
20
Do not be among those who drink wine excessively, among those who gorge themselves on flesh.
21
For the drunkard and the glutton shall become poor, and drowsiness shall clothe an ish with rags.
22
Hear your father who begot you, and do not despise your mother when she grows old.
23
Acquire truth and do not sell it— wisdom, discipline, and understanding.
24
Rejoicing, the father of the righteous shall surely rejoice, and the one who fathers a wise son shall be glad in him.
25
Let your father and your mother rejoice, and let she who bore you be glad.
26
My son, give me your heart, and let your eyes delight in my ways.
27
For a prostitute is a deep pit, and a foreign ishah is a narrow well.
28
She also lies in wait like a robber and increases the treacherous among Adam.
29
Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaint? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes?
30
Those who linger over wine, those who go to search out mixed wine.
31
Do not look at wine when it is red, when it gives its color in the cup, when it goes down smoothly.
32
At its end it bites like a serpent and strikes like a viper.
33
Your eyes shall see strange things, and your heart shall speak perversities.
34
And you shall be like one lying down in the heart of the sea, or like one lying at the top of a mast.
35
“They struck me, but I was not wounded. They beat me, but I did not know it. When shall I awaken? I will seek it yet again.”