Ditch

In its one figurative use under this heading, the ditch is not a feature of farming or war but an image of moral entrapment.

A Deep Ditch in Proverbs

The wisdom poem against the seductive woman closes with a paired line: "For a whore is a deep ditch; / And a foreign woman is a narrow pit" (Pr 23:27). The two figures sit in parallel — deep ditch and narrow pit — and both name what cannot easily be climbed out of. The figure trades on the practical fact that an unseen pit fills with water and silt and leaves the one who falls in trapped at the bottom; the verse hands that picture over to the moral warning the chapter is making about adultery.