18 verses presenting the final contrast between Wisdom and Folly, each calling out from the heights of the city with opposite invitations.
Proverbs 9 closes the book's long introduction with a final dramatic scene. Two women sit at the highest points of the city. Both call out to the same passersby. Both use almost identical words. But their destinations could not be more different.
Wisdom has built her house, prepared a feast, and sent her servants out with a genuine invitation: come, eat, drink, forsake foolishness and live. She is the host of the most generous banquet imaginable.
Folly, by contrast, has prepared nothing. She simply calls out with a promise she cannot keep: stolen water is sweet, food eaten in secret is pleasant. She does not mention that the dead are there, that her house is the road to death.
Jesus's parable is a direct echo of Wisdom's feast in Proverbs 9. The preparation is the same. The invitation is the same. The rejection is the same. And the response to rejection is the same: the invitation goes out wider, to anyone willing to come.