Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 12:6 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 6. 6The words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood: but the mouth of the upright shall deliver them.
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 words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood” against “the mouth of the upright shall deliver them”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 12:4–7
Read Proverbs 12:6 with 12:4–7. Read alone, “The words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood: but the…” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: uses contrastive parallelism to place “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband” against “she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones”; by 12:7, it uses contrastive parallelism to place “The wicked are overthrown, and are not” against “the house of the righteous shall stand”. Together the unit concentrates on justice, truthful judgment, and protection from exploitation, gendered imagery, sexual fidelity, consent, and household agency, speech, listening, truth, and relational consequence within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why It Needs Context
The line's necessary work is contextual: it uses contrastive parallelism to place “The words of the wicked are to lie in wait for blood” against “the mouth of the upright shall deliver them”. The surrounding unit supplies the comparison, affected people, and outcome required for interpretation.
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 12:4–7 — Justice, truthful judgment, and protection from exploitation — A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she 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 12:4–7, 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 12:4-12:7
Open source ↗