Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 13:18 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 18. 18Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth instruction: but he that regardeth reproof shall be honoured.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Role in This Section
This verse uses contrastive parallelism to place “Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth…” against “he that regardeth reproof shall be honoured”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 13:16–19
Read Proverbs 13:18 with 13:16–19. Read alone, “Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth instruction:…” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: uses contrastive parallelism to place “Every prudent man dealeth with knowledge” against “a fool layeth open his folly”; by 13:19, it uses contrastive parallelism to place “The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul” against “it is abomination to fools to depart from evil”. Together the unit concentrates on wisdom, folly, teachability, and moral perception, truthful testimony, honest measures, and integrity, wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why It Needs Context
The line's necessary work is contextual: it uses contrastive parallelism to place “Poverty and shame shall be to him that refuseth…” against “he that regardeth reproof shall be honoured”. The surrounding unit supplies the comparison, affected people, and outcome required for interpretation.
Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
Read Proverbs 13:16–19 — Wisdom, folly, teachability, and moral perception — Every prudent man dealeth with knowledge: but a fool…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 13:16–19, 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 13:16-13:19
Open source ↗