[ 1 minutes to read ]

But he knoweth not that the dead are there; and that her guests are in the depths of hell.
– Proverbs 9:18

[T]his makes the fourth time Solomon has reached this conclusion in his warnings (Proverbs 2:18-19; 5:5; 7:26-27; 9:18). We have already noted the general trend in Proverbs that wisdom tends to life and folly tends to death. The various aspects of death in Proverbs call for a much larger treatment than in the brief comments here. The ancient Semitic worldview in the Old Testament viewed death more in terms of a realm than a single event that ends life. They thought in terms of a conflict between the realm of the living and the unseen realm of the dead. The foolish guests of the foolish woman have entered in the way of death and consort with that realm as the words for the dead and the depths of hell indicate. The fools do not understand that going that way means they are unlikely to be recovered (Proverbs 2:19; 7:25-27).

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