1When you sit to eat with a ruler, || Diligently consider that which [is] before you,

2And you have put a knife to your throat, || If you [are] a man of appetite.

3Have no desire to his delicacies, seeing it [is] lying food.

4Do not labor to make wealth, || Cease from your own understanding, || Do you cause your eyes to fly on it? Then it is not.

5For wealth makes wings to itself, || It flies to the heavens as an eagle.

6Do not eat the bread of an evil eye, || And have no desire to his delicacies,

7For as he has thought in his soul, so he [is]. “Eat and drink,” he says to you, || And his heart [is] not with you.

8You vomit up your morsel you have eaten, || And have marred your words that [are] sweet.

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

10Do not remove a border of ancient times, || And do not enter into fields of the fatherless,

11For their Redeemer [is] strong, || He pleads their cause with you.

12Bring your heart to instruction, || And your ear to sayings of knowledge.

13Do not withhold discipline from a youth, || When you strike him with a rod he does not die.

14You strike him with a rod, || And you deliver his soul from Sheol.

15My son, if your heart has been wise, || My heart rejoices, even mine,

16And my reins exult when your lips speak uprightly.

17Do not let your heart be envious at sinners, || But—in the fear of YHWH all the day.

18For is there a posterity? Then your hope is not cut off.

19Hear, my son, and be wise, || And make your heart blessed in the way,

20Do not become drunk with wine, || Among gluttonous ones of flesh,

21For the drunkard and glutton become poor, || And drowsiness clothes with rags.

22Listen to your father, who begot you, || And do not despise your mother when she has become old.

23Buy truth, and do not sell, || Wisdom, and instruction, and understanding,

24The father of the righteous rejoices greatly, || The begetter of the wise rejoices in him.

25Your father and your mother rejoice, || Indeed, she bearing you is joyful.

26Give, my son, your heart to me, || And let your eyes watch my ways.

27For a harlot [is] a deep ditch, || And a strange woman [is] a narrow pit.

28She also, as catching prey, lies in wait, || And she increases the treacherous among men.

29Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaint? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes?

30Those lingering by the wine, || Those going in to search out mixed wine.

31Do not see wine when it shows itself red, || When it gives its color in the cup, || It goes up and down through the upright.

32Its latter end—it bites as a serpent, || And it stings as a viper.

33Your eyes see strange women, || And your heart speaks perverse things.

34And 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!”