This verse sits inside the father's window narrative, Proverbs 7:1–27.
Quick answer
Two places again: on the hands, where the work happens, and on the heart, where the deciding happens. The father wants the teaching visible and internal at once.
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 gives the appeal a physical form and reaches for the oldest instruction language Israel had. Binding words on the hand is the vocabulary of Deuteronomy 6, where the commands are bound as a sign on the hand and worn between the eyes, and the father is borrowing that register for his own household counsel. The second line goes further inward. A tablet is what you write on when the writing is meant to last, and the surface he names is the heart, which this book treats as the seat of decision. Notice who holds the pen. In this verse the son does the inscribing.
From this side of the cross
The verse asks a son to write his father's teaching on his own heart, and that is a real assignment, honestly given. What the New Covenant announces goes further, and the difference is in the hand holding the stylus. God says through Jeremiah, "I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts" (Jeremiah 31:33), and Paul tells the Corinthians they are a letter "written not with ink but by the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of flesh, that is, of the heart" (2 Corinthians 3:3). Proverbs is not secretly saying that. It is asking a young man to do something good and difficult. The gospel's word is that the inscription a person could never quite finish on himself has been made by Someone else.
Related: Deuteronomy 6:6–8 · Jeremiah 31:33 · 2 Corinthians 3:3 · Proverbs 3:3
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.