Proverbs 6:24
To keep thee from the evil woman, from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman.
To keep thee from the evil woman,.... This is one use of the profit arising from attending to the instructions of parents, and to the law of God, as taught by them; to preserve from fornication and adultery, one of its precepts expressly forbidding adultery and all corporeal uncleanness; and the whole of it directing to an observance of all duties respecting God and our neighbour, which requires diligence and industry, and prevents idleness, that inlet to all sin, and especially to uncleanness {k};
from the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman; the same with the evil woman, the lewd and adulterous one; see Proverbs 2:16. Jarchi interprets this of idolatry; the character well agrees with the idolatrous church of Rome, or antichrist, represented by a whore,
Revelation 17:1; as this woman is called "the woman of evil" {l}, for so it may be rendered, one very evil, given up and abandoned to sin; so antichrist is called "the man of sin", 2 Thessalonians 2:3; and as this woman is said to have the "smoothness of a strange tongue" {m}, as the words may be translated, and are by the Targum; so the religion of this false church is delivered in a strange language the people understand not, by which they are kept in ignorance and deception; now the word of God read and explained in the mother tongue, and especially the Gospel part of it, the doctrine of wisdom, is a means of preserving persons from the errors and heresies, superstition and idolatry, of the church of Rome, and from being carried away with their false glosses, and gaudy worship, and all its deceivable ways of unrighteousness.
{k} "Otia si tollas periere cupidinis arcus", Ovid. de Remed. Amor. l. 1. v. 139. Quaeritur Aegistheus, "quare sit factus adulter?--in promptu causa est, desidiosus erat". Ibid. v. 161, 162.
{l} er tvam "a muliere mali", Baynus, Mercerus, Cocceius, Gejerus, Michaelis.
{m} hyrkn Nwvl tqlxm "a lenitate linguae extraneae", Montanus; "a laevitate linguae peregrinae", Michaelis; "ex lubrica glabritie linguae peregrinae", Schultens.