Proverbs 7:1–5

Proverbs 7:1 — "My son, keep my words." The passage opens in the voice of a father addressing his son — a rhetorical convention repeated throughout Proverbs 1–9 that establishes the book's fundamental pedagogy: wisdom is transmitted through personal, covenantal relationship, not merely institutional instruction. The Hebrew šāmar ("keep") carries connotations far richer than intellectual retention. It is the same verb used of Adam's commission to "keep" the garden (Gen 2:15) and of Israel's obligation to "keep" the commandments of the covenant (Deut 5:10). To "keep" the father's words is to guard them as one guards a trust — an active, ongoing vigilance. The possessive "my words" also signals that this is not merely human fatherly advice; in the broader canon, the divine Father speaks through human wisdom literature.

Proverbs 7:2 — "Keep my commandments and live!" The emphatic repetition of šāmar (keep) intensifies the urgency. The pairing of "commandments" (miṣwōt) with "life" (ḥāyeh) echoes the Deuteronomic theology of Torah as the path of life: "See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction" (Deut 30:15). Obedience is not merely morally useful — it is ontologically life-giving. The exclamation point inherent in the Hebrew imperative suggests passionate fatherly desire, not cold rule-giving. The son is being urged toward flourishing, not merely compliance.

Proverbs 7:3 — "Bind them on your fingers." This image draws on the practice of tefillin (phylacteries) — small leather boxes containing Torah texts bound on the hand and forehead (cf. Deut 6:8; Ex 13:9). Here the father spiritualizes the practice: the words are to be bound not merely externally but written on the fingers — the instruments of action, the means by which a person touches and interacts with the world. Every act of the hand, every contact with external reality, is to be mediated through the received wisdom. The parallel in Proverbs 3:3 ("bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart") shows the progressive interiorization: from the neck, to the fingers, to the heart.

Proverbs 7:4 — "Tell wisdom, 'You are my sister.'" This is the theological and poetic climax of the opening movement. "Sister" ('āḥôt) in ancient Near Eastern love poetry (cf. Song of Songs 4:9–10, 12; 5:1–2) denotes the most intimate form of beloved — one who is not sought as a stranger but known from within the household of life. The student is to court Wisdom as an intimate companion, not approach her as a distant oracle. The personification of Wisdom here anticipates the fuller development of Wisdom as a divine person in Proverbs 8, the Book of Wisdom (7:22–8:1), and ultimately in the Johannine Logos (John 1:1–14). To call Wisdom "sister" is to enter into a familial, covenantal, affective bond — an amicitia (friendship) in the classical and Thomistic sense: willing the good of another for the other's own sake.

Proverbs 7:5 — "That they may keep you from the strange woman." The purpose clause reveals the protective function of this intimate bond with Wisdom: it guards against the 'iššāh zārāh ("strange/foreign woman"), the adulteress who reappears throughout Proverbs 2, 5, 6, and 7. On the literal level, she represents the seductress who leads the young man into sexual immorality and ruin. On the typological level, she represents every seductive ideology or disordered desire that draws the soul away from covenant fidelity. The logic is important: wisdom does not protect by mere prohibition but by filling the affective space that temptation would otherwise occupy. When the heart already loves wisdom as a sister, the "strange woman" loses her power of novelty and allure.

Catholic tradition reads these verses on multiple levels simultaneously, consistent with the fourfold sense of Scripture articulated by St. John Cassian and systematized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (I, q.1, a.10).

On the allegorical level, the Church Fathers consistently identified the personified Wisdom of Proverbs with the eternal Son of God. St. Athanasius (Orations Against the Arians, II.18) and St. Augustine (De Trinitate, VII.3) both read Proverbs 8 (which chapter 7 directly introduces) as a pre-figuration of the Incarnate Word. To be exhorted to "take Wisdom as a sister" is, for the Christian, an invitation to intimacy with Christ Himself — the one who "became for us wisdom from God" (1 Cor 1:30). The Catechism echoes this: "The Son of God... is himself both the Wisdom of God and the one who reveals it" (CCC §272).

On the moral level, the binding of commandments "on the fingers" anticipates the New Law written not on stone tablets but on the heart by the Holy Spirit (Jer 31:33; 2 Cor 3:3). St. Thomas Aquinas (ST I-II, q.106, a.1) identifies this interiorization as the defining characteristic of the New Covenant: grace does not merely command from outside but transforms from within. The father's exhortation — keep, bind, embrace — describes the ascetical movement from external discipline toward interior virtue that Catholic moral theology calls the formation of a habitus.

The anagogical dimension points toward the nuptial mystery of the soul's final union with God. The call to call Wisdom "sister" foreshadows the spousal mysticism of the Song of Songs, which the Catholic tradition (St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs; St. John of the Cross, Spiritual Canticle) reads as the soul's progressive union with the Divine Beloved. Vatican II's Dei Verbum §12 confirms that the full meaning of Scripture unfolds through precisely this kind of multi-layered reading within the living Tradition of the Church.

Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with competing "strange women" — not only sexual temptation (though that remains acute in a pornography-saturated culture) but the seductive voices of consumerism, ideological tribalism, cynicism, and spiritual acedia. This passage offers a critical diagnostic: the reason seduction succeeds is almost never raw willpower failure alone. It succeeds because the soul has not first cultivated a deep, affective, habitual love of wisdom. The father does not say, "Resist the adulteress." He says, "First, love wisdom as a sister."

Practically, this calls Catholic readers to forms of daily formation that are affective, not merely intellectual: lectio divina with Scripture, the Liturgy of the Hours, the Rosary, regular Confession — disciplines that bind divine wisdom "on the fingers" through repetition until it shapes reflex and desire. The Church's long tradition of daily examination of conscience (examen, as taught by St. Ignatius of Loyola) is exactly the kind of "binding" Proverbs 7:3 envisions: making every act of the day pass through the filter of received wisdom before temptation arrives, not after.