Proverbs 22:14 · World English Bible
Proverbs 22:14 Meaning The Mouth of an Adulteress Is
The mouth of an adulteress is a deep pit. He who is under Yahweh’s wrath will fall into it.
What does Proverbs 22:14 mean?
Temptation is never in the object; it is in the mind that has already agreed to be caught. What seems a pit that swallows from without is the shape of a choice made within, a longing for separation that dresses itself as something offered from outside and waits to be blamed.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 22:14 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Temptation is never in the object; it is in the mind that has already agreed to be caught. What seems a pit that swallows from without is the shape of a choice made within, a longing for separation that dresses itself as something offered from outside and waits to be blamed. The mind that has turned from love goes looking for a reason to fall, and finds one wearing a seductive face.
Nothing pulls a whole mind down. Only a mind already estranged from itself hollows out the ground beneath its own feet and calls the hole a stranger's doing. The deep place was dug by the wish to be lost, and the fall was chosen long before the edge appeared.
Strange women: the alluring form the mind gives its own wish to be separate, temptation seen as coming from another rather than from within Pit: the emptiness the mind digs by choosing fear, the fall it prepares and then attributes to something outside itself
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Live Proverbs 22:14 today
- When you reach for the phone out of a restless ache today, pause with your hand on it and ask what you were actually about to go looking for. The screen is not the thing; the ache is.
- If you catch yourself blaming someone for making you feel small, sit with the possibility that you had already agreed to feel that way before they opened their mouth.
- When something tempts you to be less than yourself at work, name the wish underneath it rather than fighting the thing in front of you. The thing has no power once the wish is in daylight.
Where today are you calling something a trap that you actually walked toward?
The same truth in other traditions
Bhagavad Gita 3
The senses are not the enemy. Desire hides in the mind behind them, and it is there that the pull begins and there that it has to be met.
Buddhism · Dhammapada
No enemy can harm you as your own untrained mind can. The hand that wounds you most is the one you cannot see holding the knife.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Things themselves do not pull us about. Our own judgment of them does, which is why the work is never on the thing but on the one judging.
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