A young man rode from Tiberias to Betar and met a young woman who fell in love with him on sight. They married within days. A year later she asked him to bring her to visit her parents, and they set out together on the road.
A robber stopped them. He was tall and dangerous. The wife took one look at him and fell in love a second time. She abandoned her husband in the moment. The robber tied the husband to a tree. Husband and wife watched each other from opposite sides of the clearing while the wife and the robber disappeared into the bushes.
Afterward the robber fell asleep, exhausted, beside a jug of wine he had carried from his last raid. A snake, thirsty, crawled to the jug and drank from it. Before retreating, the snake spilled venom into the wine.
The robber woke, drank, and died in convulsions at the woman's feet.
She was now alone with her tied-up husband. She approached him. If you promise not to kill me, I will untie you. He promised. She freed him. They continued the journey together to her parents' house.
There, in front of her father, the husband told the whole story. The father listened to the end. Then he drew his blade and killed his own daughter.
Solomon used this tale, Gaster's Exempla (No. 401, 1924) reports, to illustrate Ecclesiastes 7:28: Among a thousand women I have not found a faithful one. The Exempla adds a companion story from the same collection — the man who refused to kill his wife at Solomon's command, paired with the woman who was willing to kill her husband when Solomon tested her. Solomon used both cases as evidence in his harsh royal verdict on human fidelity.
The rabbis preserved Solomon's pessimism but also pushed back on it in the Talmud, where they argued that his line applies only to certain generations. Even in his darkest proverb, the sages insisted, Solomon was not describing every woman — only the women who chose a robber on the road.