This verse opens the father's warning about the gang, Proverbs 1:8–19.
The book's teaching voice begins: my son, hear. Father's instruction and mother's law stand side by side, the home as wisdom's first school and both parents as its faculty.
The father's warning about the gang is a drama with a script. It opens with the appeal that will head every lecture, hear your father's instruction, do not forsake your mother's law, and crowns obedience with ornament: garland for the head, chains for the neck (vv. 8–9). Then it stages the danger. Sinners will entice you, and the father does not paraphrase them; he performs their whole pitch (vv. 11–14): the thrill ("let us lie in wait"), the loot ("we shall fill our houses with spoil"), and, most seductive of all, the belonging ("cast in your lot among us, let us all have one purse"). Then he answers it (vv. 15–19): do not walk with them, and here is what they cannot see, the trap they are laying is for themselves. Even a bird avoids a net spread in plain sight (v. 17), but these men are blinder than birds: they ambush their own lives, because greed's way "takes away the life of its owners" (v. 19). The lecture's method is the book's method in miniature: it does not just forbid; it lets the temptation speak at full strength, then teaches the son to see through it to the ending. Note who recruits him: not strangers, peers. The first threat to a young life in this book is not the harlot or the fool but the group that offers brotherhood at the price of blood.
This verse contributes the address that will govern ten chapters: "my son," wisdom passed as inheritance, warm, urgent, and personal. Both parents are named as teachers, the father's instruction and the mother's torah, her law, teaching with full weight, and the book means it; its final chapter is a mother's counsel to a king (31:1). The verbs assign the son his part: hear, and do not forsake, receive now and hold on later, because the lecture about to unfold assumes voices will soon compete for him. Verse 10 introduces them. The home's teaching is the son's first allegiance precisely because it will not be the loudest voice on the street.
Related: Proverbs 6:20 · Proverbs 31:1 · Ephesians 6:1–3
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.