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10 For wisdom will enter your heart,
    and knowledge will fill you with joy.
11 Wise choices will watch over you.
    Understanding will keep you safe.

12 Wisdom will save you from evil people,
    from those whose words are twisted.
13 These men turn from the right way
    to walk down dark paths.
14 They take pleasure in doing wrong,
    and they enjoy the twisted ways of evil.
15 Their actions are crooked,
    and their ways are wrong.

16 Wisdom will save you from the immoral woman,
    from the seductive words of the promiscuous woman.
17 She has abandoned her husband
    and ignores the covenant she made before God.
18 Entering her house leads to death;
    it is the road to the grave.[a]
19 The man who visits her is doomed.
    He will never reach the paths of life.

20 So follow the steps of the good,
    and stay on the paths of the righteous.

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Footnotes

  1. 2:18 Hebrew to the spirits of the dead.

10 for wisdom will enter your heart,
    and knowledge will be pleasing to your soul.[a]
11 Discretion will watch over you;
    understanding will protect you,
12 in order to deliver you from the way of evil,[b]
    from a man who speaks devious things—
13 those who forsake the paths of uprightness
    to walk in ways of darkness,
14 those who are happy to do evil,
    for they delight in the deviousness of evil,
15 who are crooked in their ways,[c]
    and devious in their paths;
16 in order to deliver you from a strange woman,
    from a foreign woman who flatters[d] with her sayings,
17 she who forsakes the partner of her youth
    and has forgotten the covenant of her God,
18 for her house sinks to death,
    and to the dead[e] are her paths.
19 Of all who go to her, none shall return,
    nor do they reach paths of life.
20 So that you will walk on the road of those who are good,
    and the paths of those who are righteous you shall keep.

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Footnotes

  1. Proverbs 2:10 Or “inner self”
  2. Proverbs 2:12 Or “evildoer”
  3. Proverbs 2:15 Literally “that in their ways are crooked”
  4. Proverbs 2:16 Or “makes smooth”
  5. Proverbs 2:18 Or “Rephaim”