This verse closes the father's window narrative, Proverbs 7:1–27. The NKJV's "hell" here translates Sheol.
Quick answer
The chapter's last word is a direction: down. The verse describes where the road goes, not a sentence pronounced on anyone walking it.
Read the whole unit
The father has warned about this before, twice, and it has not worked. So he stops arguing and tells a story.
That is what makes this chapter different from chapter 5 and from the closing half of chapter 6. Those made cases: here is what it costs, here is what you already have at home, here is the arithmetic. This one puts the son at a window after dark and makes him watch. Five verses of appeal, then eighteen verses of narrative, then a closing plea. The father does not explain the story until it is over, and by then he does not have to.
Three details in the telling are worth having before the verses.
The vantage point is a window, and the narrator is the father. He looked through his own lattice and saw what happened, which means the counsel his son is receiving is not theory. Whatever else this chapter is, it is an older man saying that he has watched this happen to somebody.
The young man is not a villain. He is "among the simple," which in this book is a teachable category rather than a condemned one, and the phrase describing him, rendered "devoid of understanding," is literally lacking heart. It is the same idiom used of the adulterer at 6:32, and the NKJV footnotes it plainly at 17:18. He is not wicked. He is unformed, out late, walking a street he had no business on, and the chapter is not interested in despising him. It is interested in the son not becoming him.
One word ties the appeal to the disaster. In verse 2 the father tells his son to keep his teaching as the ishon of his eye, the pupil, the most protected part of the body. In verse 9 the young man walks toward the house in the ishon of night, the blackness at the center of the dark. It is the same Hebrew word, seven verses apart, and the NKJV's own footnotes elsewhere gloss it as pupil (Deuteronomy 32:10, Psalm 17:8). What you guard like the center of your eye, or what you walk into at the center of the night: the chapter sets those two against each other and never mentions it again.
Two things must be said about how this chapter is used.
It is not a chapter about women. The terms in verse 5 are the same relational pair used in chapter 5, meaning other, outside, not-yours; they describe a relationship rather than a character type. And the narrative is scrupulous about where the consequence lands. Every one of the animal images in verses 22 and 23 is the young man. The father is not teaching his son that women are dangerous. He is showing him a man walking somewhere at midnight and what happened next.
It is not a chapter about weak men. Verse 26 forecloses that reading before anyone can reach for it: those she cast down were many, and "all who were slain by her were strong men." The father is deliberately removing the exit his son would most like to take, which is the assumption that this happens to other people, lesser people, people with less going for them. Nobody in this chapter reads the story and gets to feel safe.
For the reader who is already past this, the closing warning describes a road behind rather than ahead, and this lecture is not Scripture's last word over anyone. The warning stays at full strength for the one still choosing. The door stays open for the one who did not heed it.
What this verse contributes
This verse ends the lecture with an address rather than an argument. The house that was full of linen and cinnamon in her speech is described in the father's closing line as a route, and the direction is the one this book always gives the wrong road. "Chambers" keeps the domestic image going to the end, so the bedroom and the grave are drawn as rooms in the same building. It is the coldest sentence in the chapter, and it arrives with no commentary at all.
Why translations differ
"Hell" renders Sheol, and the NKJV's own footnote supplies the alternative. In the Old Testament, Sheol is the realm of the dead, the destination of everyone, rather than the developed later doctrine of final punishment. What the verse is describing is a descent that begins early and is self-inflicted, a life going down before its time, which is what the whole narrative has just shown happening to a man who did not know. It is not a map of the afterlife and should not be pressed into one in either direction.
From this side of the cross
The warning is real and needs no softening for the reader still choosing; the father tells this story because he believes a person can hear it in time. For the reader who is already past that fork, this chapter is not Scripture's last word. Jesus met a woman caught in exactly this sin, waited out her accusers, and said, "Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more" (John 8:11). The young man in the story did not know what it would cost. The gospel's word is that the cost was known perfectly well by Someone who paid it anyway.
Related: John 8:10–11 · Romans 8:1 · Proverbs 5:5 · Proverbs 2:18–19
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.