17. Be not wicked to excess, and be not foolish. Why should you die before your time?”
18. It is good to hold to this rule, and not to let that one go; but the one who fears God will succeed with both.
19. Wisdom is a better defense for the wise than ten princes in the city,
20. yet there is no one on earth so just as to do good and never sin.
21. Do not give your heart to every word that is spoken; you may hear your servant cursing you,
22. for your heart knows that you have many times cursed others.
23. All these things I probed in wisdom. I said, “I will acquire wisdom”; but it was far beyond me.
24. What exists is far-reaching; it is deep, very deep: Who can find it out?
25. I turned my heart toward knowledge; I sought and pursued wisdom and its design, and I recognized that wickedness is foolishness and folly is madness.
26. More bitter than death I find the woman who is a hunter’s trap, whose heart is a snare, whose hands are prison bonds. The one who pleases God will be delivered from her, but the one who displeases will be entrapped by her.
27. See, this have I found, says Qoheleth, adding one to one to find the sum.
28. What my soul still seeks and has yet to find is this: “One man out of a thousand have I found, but a woman among them all I have not found.”
29. But this alone I have found: God made humankind honest, but they have pursued many designs.