How grateful we can be that true wisdom and its associated qualities also protect us from the bad way of immoral men and women! Solomon adds that these qualities are “to deliver you from the strange woman, from the foreign woman who has made her own sayings smooth, who is leaving the confidential friend of her youth and who has forgotten the very covenant of her God. For down to death her house does sink and down to those impotent in death her tracks. None of those having relations with her will come back, nor will they regain the paths of those living.”​—Proverbs 2:16-19.

“The strange woman,” the prostitute, is portrayed as one who leaves “the confidential friend of her youth”​—likely the husband of her young womanhood.a (Compare Malachi 2:14.) She has forgotten the prohibition on adultery that was a part of the Law covenant. (Exodus 20:14) Her tracks are leading to death. Those having company with her might never “regain the paths of those living,” since sooner or later they may reach a point of no return, namely death, from which they cannot come back. A man of discernment and thinking ability is aware of the lures of immorality and wisely avoids getting entangled in them.

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