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¹ When you sit to eat with a ruler, || Diligently consider that which [is] before you,² And you have put a knife to your throat, || If you [are] a man of appetite.³ Have no desire to his delicacies, seeing it [is] lying food.

⁴ Do not labor to make wealth, || Cease from your own understanding, || Do you cause your eyes to fly on it? Then it is not.⁵ For wealth makes wings to itself, || It flies to the heavens as an eagle.

⁶ Do not eat the bread of an evil eye, || And have no desire to his delicacies,⁷ For as he has thought in his soul, so he [is]. "Eat and drink," he says to you, || And his heart [is] not with you.⁸ You vomit up your morsel you have eaten, || And have marred your words that [are] sweet.

⁹ Do not speak in the ears of a fool, || For he treads on the wisdom of your words.

¹⁰ Do not remove a border of ancient times, || And do not enter into fields of the fatherless,¹¹ For their Redeemer [is] strong, || He pleads their cause with you.

¹² Bring your heart to instruction, || And your ear to sayings of knowledge.¹³ Do not withhold discipline from a youth, || When you strike him with a rod he does not die.¹⁴ You strike him with a rod, || And you deliver his soul from Sheol.¹⁵ My son, if your heart has been wise, || My heart rejoices, even mine,¹⁶ And my reins exult when your lips speak uprightly.

¹⁷ Do not let your heart be envious at sinners, || But—in the fear of YHWH all the day.¹⁸ For is there a posterity? Then your hope is not cut off.

¹⁹ Hear, my son, and be wise, || And make your heart blessed in the way,²⁰ Do not become drunk with wine, || Among gluttonous ones of flesh,²¹ For the drunkard and glutton become poor, || And drowsiness clothes with rags.²² Listen to your father, who begot you, || And do not despise your mother when she has become old.²³ Buy truth, and do not sell, || Wisdom, and instruction, and understanding,²⁴ The father of the righteous rejoices greatly, || The begetter of the wise rejoices in him.²⁵ Your father and your mother rejoice, || Indeed, she bearing you is joyful.²⁶ Give, my son, your heart to me, || And let your eyes watch my ways.²⁷ For a harlot [is] a deep ditch, || And a strange woman [is] a narrow pit.²⁸ She also, as catching prey, lies in wait, || And she increases the treacherous among men.

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 lingering by the wine, || Those going in to search out mixed wine.³¹ Do not see wine when it shows itself red, || When it gives its color in the cup, || It goes up and down through the upright.³² Its latter end—it bites as a serpent, || And it stings as a viper.³³ Your eyes see strange women, || And your heart speaks perverse things.³⁴ And you have been as one lying down in the heart of the sea, || And as one lying down on the top of a mast.³⁵ "They struck me, I have not been sick, || They beat me, I have not known. When I awake—I seek it yet again!"