Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 10:21 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 21. 21The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of wisdom.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Role in This Section
This verse uses contrastive parallelism to place “The lips of the righteous feed many” against “fools die for want of wisdom”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 10:18–23
Read Proverbs 10:21 with 10:18–23. Read alone, “The lips of the righteous feed many: but fools die for want of…” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: contributes the claim, image, or instruction “He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that uttereth a slander, is a fool”; by 10:23, it uses contrastive parallelism to place “It is as sport to a fool to do mischief” against “a man of understanding hath wisdom”. Together the unit concentrates on speech, listening, truth, and relational consequence, wisdom, folly, teachability, and moral perception, wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why It Needs Context
This context pointer uses contrastive parallelism to place “The lips of the righteous feed many” against “fools die for want of wisdom”. Read Proverbs 10:18–23 before assigning independent truth or application to Proverbs 10:21.
Continue in Context
Read the complete section for the connected explanation and how it should shape life. This verse is a doorway into that passage, not a saying that stands alone.
Read Proverbs 10:18–23 — Speech, listening, truth, and relational consequence — He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that…Sources used for this context pointer
How certain is this explanation? probable
These are the sources used directly for this lens. Language, grammar, disagreements, and the complete source shelf remain attached to the full thought-unit research record.
Biblical text
King James (Authorized) Version — eng-kjv2006
eBible.org and CrossWire Bible Society
USFM archive eng-kjv2006_usfm.zip; source files dated 2026-08-19; downloaded 2026-08-24; archive SHA-256 aec1b3b26c622fd3d963d2bbac963016b9513246ffbfa20da00bb100372ea007; normalized corpus SHA-256 09aef51d90488aa7b9722b3fd9a93f4b25f6bf2064c5fd798fb39673c300ddf2.
Supports: Exact displayed KJV words, canonical order, paragraph flags, supplied-word markup, and complete unit coverage.
Exact location: Proverbs 10:18–23, repository-pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM-derived corpus
Open source ↗hebrew text and morphology
Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible: Proverbs
Open Scriptures
Open Scriptures, release 2.2
Supports: Masoretic Hebrew wording and morphology used only for the exact unit's lexical, grammatical, parallel, superscription, number-saying, and acrostic questions.
Exact location: Open Scriptures MorphHB v2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Prov.xml, OSIS 10:18-10:23
Open source ↗