Verse 5. This woman not only represents the harlot and the adulteress literally, but it is also a figure of whatever seduces the soul from God, whether in morals or religion, and whether in doctrine and practice, or in religious worship.—Wordsworth.
Strange, indeed, if she alienate us from the very God that made her, and stir the jealousy of the very Being that gives us our power to love her. (Hosea ii. 8.)—Miller.
Verse 6. God is ever at His window, His casement is always open to see what thou dost.—Jermin.
Verse 8. Circumstances which give an occasion to sin are to be noticed and avoided. They who love danger fall into it. The youth (as verse 21 shows) did not go with the intention of defiling himself with the “strange woman,” but to flatter his own vanity by seeing and talking with her, and hearing her flatteries. It is madness to play with Satan’s edged tools.—Faussett.
The beginning of the sad end. The loitering evening walk, the unseasonable hour (Job xxiv. 15; Rom. xiii. 12, 13); the vacant mind. “The house was empty,” and therefore ready for the reception of the tempter (Matt. xii. 44, 45), and soon altogether in his possession. How valuable are self-discipline, self-control, constant employment, active energy of pursuit, as preservatives under the Divine blessing from fearful danger.—Bridges.
Verses 7–9. The first character appears on the scene, young, “simple” in the bad sense of the word; open to all impressions of evil, empty-headed and empty-hearted; lounging near the place of ill-repute, not as yet deliberately purposing to sin, but placing himself in the way of it; wandering idly to see one of whose beauty he has heard, and this at a time when the pure in heart would seek their home. It is impossible not to see a certain symbolic meaning in this picture of the gathering gloom. Night is falling over the young man’s life as the shadows deepen.—Plumptre.
Verse 9. He thought to obscure himself, but Solomon saw him; how much more God, before whom night will convert itself into noon, and silence prove a speaking evidence. Foolish men think to hide themselves from God, by hiding God from themselves.—Trapp.
Verse 10. A careless sinner shall not need to go far to meet with temptation. The first woman met with it almost as soon as she was made, and who meets not everywhere with the woman Temptation?—Jermin.
Verse 14. Though I indulge in amours, do not think I am averse to the worship of God; nay, I offer liberally to Him: He is now therefore appeased, and will not mind venial offences.—Cartwright.
It is of course possible that the worship of Israel had so degenerated as to lose for the popular conscience all religious significance; but the hypothesis stated above (see [note] at the beginning of the chapter), affords a simpler explanation. She who speaks is a foreigner who, under a show of conformity to the religion of Israel, still retains her old notions, and a feast-day is nothing to her but a time of self-indulgence, which she may invite another to share with her. If we assume, as probable, that these harlots of Jerusalem were mainly of Phœnician origin, the connection of their worship with their sin would be but the continuation of their original cultus.—Plumptre.