Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 10:23 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 23. 23It is as sport to a fool to do mischief: but a man of understanding hath 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 “It is as sport to a fool to do mischief” against “a man of understanding hath wisdom”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 10:18–23
At Proverbs 10:23, the unit uses contrastive parallelism to place “It is as sport to a fool to do mischief” against “a man of understanding hath wisdom”. That precise work supports “Speech, listening, truth, and relational consequence — He that hideth hatred with lying lips, and he that...” without importing a neighboring verse's subject or making the line a complete policy.
Why It Needs Context
Read this role inside the complete unit: the verse uses contrastive parallelism to place “It is as sport to a fool to do mischief” against “a man of understanding hath wisdom”. It does not carry a responsible standalone mandate apart from Proverbs 10:18–23.
Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
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? strong
Where care is needed
This sentence saying states a context-shaped moral pattern. Its small-cluster boundary and degree of generality remain reviewable; exceptional outcomes do not make the observation meaningless or turn it into a guarantee.
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 ↗