Verse Lens · Concise explanation
Proverbs 11:16 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 16. 16A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain riches.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Quick Meaning
This verse opens with “A gracious woman retaineth honour” and develops the line through “and strong men retain riches”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 11:16–19
Read Proverbs 11:16 with 11:16–19. Read alone, “A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain riches” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: opens with “A gracious woman retaineth honour” and develops the line through “and strong men retain riches”; by 11:19, it opens with “As righteousness tendeth to life” and develops the line through “so he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death”. Together the unit concentrates on justice, truthful judgment, and protection from exploitation, wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power, gendered imagery, sexual fidelity, consent, and household agency within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why This Verse Appears Here
Proverbs 11:16–19 forms a reviewed local cluster inside “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.” Its lines concentrate on justice, truthful judgment, and protection from exploitation, wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power, gendered imagery, sexual fidelity, consent, and household agency, while each sentence proverb retains its own force and the neighboring database unit does not supply its meaning. Within that relationship, this verse opens with “A gracious woman retaineth honour” and develops the line through “and strong men retain riches”.
What Remains True
Proverbs treats resources as morally consequential but never reduces wealth to virtue or poverty to personal failure. In Proverbs 11:16, that bounded truth is expressed through “A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain riches,” not through a promise detached from its literary form.
How It Can Shape Life
- Examine how money was obtained, who bears the cost, whether basic needs are met, and how resources can serve justice and durable care. Proverbs 11:16 names that responsibility through “A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain riches,” so the response must remain accountable to the person, action, comparison, or consequence in this line.
Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
Read Proverbs 11:16–19 — Justice, truthful judgment, and protection from exploitation — A gracious woman retaineth honour: and strong men retain…Sources used for this Verse Lens
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 11:16–19, 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 11:16-11:19
Open source ↗translation and translator notes
NET Bible: Proverbs with translators' notes
Biblical Studies Press
Biblical Studies Press, 2006
Supports: Verse-attached textual, lexical, grammatical, syntactic, parallelism, and older-English controls for the exact range.
Exact location: NET Bible Proverbs PDF, printed pp. 1107-1111, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 11:16–19
Open source ↗