Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 13:15 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 15. 15Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors is hard.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Role in This Section
This verse uses contrastive parallelism to place “Good understanding giveth favour” against “the way of transgressors is hard”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 13:12–15
Read Proverbs 13:15 with 13:12–15. Read alone, “Good understanding giveth favour: but the way of transgressors…” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: uses contrastive parallelism to place “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick” against “when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life”; by 13:15, it uses contrastive parallelism to place “Good understanding giveth favour” against “the way of transgressors is hard”. Together the unit concentrates on life, death, safety, and the long direction of choices, wisdom, folly, teachability, and moral perception, appetite, intoxication, desire, and self-government within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why It Needs Context
This context pointer uses contrastive parallelism to place “Good understanding giveth favour” against “the way of transgressors is hard”. Read Proverbs 13:12–15 before assigning independent truth or application to Proverbs 13:15.
Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
Read Proverbs 13:12–15 — Life, death, safety, and the long direction of choices — Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire…Sources used for this context pointer
How certain is this explanation? strong
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 13:12–15, 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 13:12-13:15
Open source ↗