Bible Strands
Proverbs 22:14
The mouth of an adulteress is a deep pit; he who is under the wrath of the LORD will fall into it.
Berean Standard Bible
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Study note
Setting — Solomon addresses a student in a wisdom collection, positioning this warning between a rebuke of cowardly excuses and a command about childhood discipline.
The words — The text identifies the adulteress's mouth as a שׁוּחָה (shu.Chah), a pit, and qualifies it as עֲ֭מֻקָּה ('A.mu.kah), deep.
The thread — The pit imagery recurs in Proverbs 23:27, which calls a prostitute a deep pit and an adulteress a narrow well, while Ecclesiastes 7:26 expands the warning by describing the same figure as a snare, a net, and chains.
Why it lands — The passage requires a reader to treat moral compromise as an inescapable descent rather than a manageable risk, and to recognize that divine wrath confirms the consequences of choosing it.
Drafted by a language model from the text, its original words and its cross-references, then checked against them. It can still be wrong: open the verse in the app to report it.
The Hebrew words
King James Version
The mouth of strange women is a deep pit: he that is abhorred of the Lord shall fall therein.
Cross-references
- Ecclesiastes 7:26 And I find more bitter than death the woman who is a snare, whose heart is a net, and whose hands are chains. The man who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is ensnared.
- Proverbs 23:27 For a prostitute is a deep pit, and an adulteress is a narrow well.
- Proverbs 6:24 to keep you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress.
- Nehemiah 13:26 Did not King Solomon of Israel sin in matters like this? There was not a king like him among many nations, and he was loved by his God, who made him king over all Israel—yet foreign women drew him into sin.
- Proverbs 7:5 that they may keep you from the adulteress, from the stranger with seductive words.
- Judges 16:20 Then she called out, “Samson, the Philistines are here!” When Samson awoke from his sleep, he thought, “I will escape as I did before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the LORD had departed from him.
- Proverbs 2:16 It will rescue you from the forbidden woman, from the stranger with seductive words
- Deuteronomy 32:19 When the LORD saw this, He rejected them, provoked to anger by His sons and daughters.
- Psalms 81:12 So I gave them up to their stubborn hearts to follow their own devices.
- Proverbs 5:3 Though the lips of the forbidden woman drip honey and her speech is smoother than oil,