This chapter discusses how wisdom will keep us from bad choices and inappropriate relationships. Here Solomon tells about a young man he watched from his window.
Being where he shouldn’t have been, he met someone he shouldn’t have met (:8-10)! While she’s clearly the aggressor, he put himself in this situation and wasn’t an innocent victim.
“She took hold of him…kissed him and with a brazen face she said…” (:13). Approaching him with confidence (“brazen face”), she takes charge and suggests all’s well here.
Her extended speech (:14-20) begins with our verses (:14-15): “Today I fulfilled my vows…I have food from my fellowship offering at home.”
She indicates she’s been to the Temple there in Jerusalem and “fulfilled my vows,” also making a “fellowship offering” of thankfulness to God for all her blessing.
A large portion of the “fellowship offering” went to the one making the offering — to be eaten in celebration that day at home with family. If her “vows” represented a “freewill offering,” it could be eaten at home with family that day and the next.
Her approach to this young man was the oldest trick in the book. Everyone knows “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach!”
But she adds, “So I came out to meet you; I looked for you and have found you!” (:15). She says she wants to share all this with him!
Her offer continues (:16-20) and, being young and simple (:7), he follows “like an ox to the slaughter” (:22).
An older and wiser man MAY have been able to see through her words and actions — realizing “there’s no such thing as a free lunch!” It will certain cost him! (:24-27).
Maybe he’d think, “Wonder who she approached like this last time…wonder who’ll be next?!?!”
It’s easy for girls to talk us guys into and out of so much – sometimes it’s bad (like here!), sometimes it’s good. Thankfully, many of us met and talked to the right girls!