More bitter than slavery, poverty, disease, will be the bitterness of self-reproach, the hopeless remorse that worketh death.

And say, how have I hated instruction,.... To live virtuously, and avoid the adulterous woman; this he says, as wondering at his stupidity, folly, and madness, that he should hate and abhor that which was so much his interest to have observed. Gersom interprets it of the instruction of the law; but it is much better to understand it of the instruction of the Gospel; which the carnal mind of man is enmity unto, and which they are so stupid as to abhor; when it is of so much usefulness to preserve from error and heresy, superstition, will worship, and idolatry;
and my heart despised reproof; for following the whorish woman; and which was secretly despised in the heart, and heartily too, if not expressed with the mouth: it is one part of the Gospel ministry to reprove for false doctrine and false worship, though it generally falls under the contempt of the erroneous and idolatrous.

The ruined sinner vainly laments his neglect of warning and his sad fate in being brought to public disgrace.

The poet now tells those whom he warns to hear how the voluptuary, looking back on his life-course, passes sentence against himself.
12 And thou sayest, "Why have I then hated correction,
And my heart despised instruction!
13 And I have not listened to the voice of my teachers,
Nor lent mine ear to my instructors?
14 I had almost fallen into every vice
In the midst of the assembly and the congregation!"
The question 12a (here more an exclamation than a question) is the combination of two: How has it become possible for me? How could it ever come to it that.... Thus also one says in Arab.: Kyf f'alat hadhâ (Fl.). The regimen of איך in 12b is becoming faint, and in 13b has disappeared. The Kal נאץ (as Proverbs 1:30; Proverbs 15:5) signifies to despise; the Piel intensively, to contemn and reject (R. נץ, pungere).