King James Version · The united kingdom
Proverbs 5
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My son, attend unto my , and bow thine ear to my : That thou mayest regard discretion, and that thy may keep knowledge. For of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged . Her feet go down to ; her steps take hold on hell. Lest thou shouldest of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them. Hear me now therefore, O ye children, and depart not from the words of my . Remove thy way far from her, and come not nigh the door of her house: Lest thou give thine unto others, and thy years unto the cruel: Lest strangers be filled with thy wealth; and thy labours be in the house of a ; And thou mourn at the last, when thy and thy body are consumed, And say, How have I hated , and despised ; And have not the voice of my teachers, nor inclined mine ear to them that instructed me! I was almost in all evil in the midst of and . Drink waters out of thine own cistern, and running waters out of thine own well. Let thy fountains be dispersed abroad, and rivers of waters in the streets. 17Let them be only thine own, and not strangers’ with thee. Let thy fountain be : and rejoice with the wife of thy youth. Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times; and be thou ravished always with her love. And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the of a ? For the ways of man are before the eyes of , and he pondereth all his goings. His own shall take himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his . He shall without ; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · The united kingdom, 1050 BC to 931 BC ›
Saul, David, and Solomon. A rare window when both Egypt and Mesopotamia are weak, which is how a small kingdom in the corridor between them could briefly become a regional power.
- The power vacuum
- This is the whole political explanation for the united kingdom. Egypt is fragmented, Assyria is recovering but still local, the Hittites are gone, and nobody is in a position to object to a strong state in the corridor. It lasts about a century, and Israel's golden age fits exactly inside it.
- Phoenicia
- Tyre under Hiram is the commercial power of the coast, and supplies the cedar, the craftsmen, and the shipping for Solomon's building programme. The alliance is trade, not charity: Israel had grain and a land route, Tyre had timber and ships.
- Egypt
- Weak enough that a pharaoh gives a daughter in marriage to an Israelite king, which is the opposite of Egyptian practice in stronger centuries. Late in the era it recovers under a new house, and Shishak will invade within five years of Solomon's death.
- Further afield
- Greece is still in its dark age but beginning to recover, and will adopt the Phoenician alphabet within a century or two. Carthage is founded by settlers from Tyre by tradition in 814 BC. In the Americas the Olmec centre shifts to La Venta.