Verse Lens · Expanded explanation
Proverbs 14:13 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 13. 13Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Quick Meaning
This verse uses two-part parallelism to place “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful” beside “and the end of that mirth is heaviness”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 14:10–14
Within First Solomonic sentence-saying collection, Proverbs 14:13 uses two-part parallelism to place “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful” beside “and the end of that mirth is heaviness”. The immediate unit supplies proportion, affected people, and the transition from meaning to application.
Why This Verse Appears Here
This verse uses two-part parallelism to place “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful” beside “and the end of that mirth is heaviness”. This contributes necessary evidence to “Emotion, resilience, grief, and inward life — The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth...,” where emotion, resilience, grief, and inward life, truthful testimony, honest measures, and integrity, family teaching, responsibility, and mutual care are read together without erasing the sentence saying's own force.
Follow the Context
- Opening (14:10): the unit uses two-part parallelism to place “The heart knoweth his own bitterness” beside “and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy”.
- Development (14:10–14): adjacent lines test emotion, resilience, grief, and inward life, truthful testimony, honest measures, and integrity, family teaching, responsibility, and mutual care through parallelism, contrast, motive, image, or consequence.
- Close (14:14): the unit opens with “The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways” and develops the line through “and a good man shall be satisfied from himself”, creating the next supported pause.
Phrase-by-Phrase Explanation
“Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that...”
In plain language: emotion, resilience, grief, and inward life
This verse uses two-part parallelism to place “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful” beside “and the end of that mirth is heaviness”.
Why it matters: This wording carries interpretive, pastoral, or misuse risk requiring the full unit and explicit limits.
How certain? probableWhat This Verse Is Not Saying
The verse does not demean joy, romanticize depression, demand emotional disclosure, or treat grief as spiritual failure.
What Remains True
Proverbs treats joy, grief, fear, envy, courage, and inward endurance as real parts of embodied life without making emotion a simple measure of virtue. In Proverbs 14:13, that bounded truth is expressed through “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that...,” not through a promise detached from its literary form.
How It Can Shape Life
- Name the emotion and its conditions honestly, avoid moralizing another person's distress, and seek relational, practical, pastoral, or clinical support proportionate to the need. For Proverbs 14:13, preserve the sequence: verse role (uses two-part parallelism to place “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful” beside “and the end of that mirth is heaviness”) -> contextual meaning in Proverbs 14:10–14 -> proportionate truth -> this accountable response.
Teach It Back
Explain Proverbs 14:13's exact role in Proverbs 14:10–14. Distinguish pattern from guarantee, include “Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful;...,” name one uncertainty, and explicitly reject one harmful use.
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Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
Read Proverbs 14:10–14 — Emotion, resilience, grief, and inward life — The heart knoweth his own bitterness; and a stranger doth...Sources used for this Verse Lens
How certain is this explanation? probable
Where care is needed
Laughter and sorrow can coexist, and a visible mood may not disclose a person's inward state. The line does not diagnose a particular person's mental health.
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 14:10–14, 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 14:10-14:14
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. 1118-1121, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 14:10–14
Open source ↗modern critical commentary
Proverbs
K. T. Aitken
Oxford University Press, in The Oxford Bible Commentary, 2001
Supports: Whole-book and collection orientation, local commentary, social-setting proposals, and named interpretation limits.
Exact location: Aitken, ‘Proverbs,’ Oxford Bible Commentary, printed pp. 405-422, subsection covering 14:10–14 and the First Solomonic sentence-saying collection outline
Open source ↗scholarly monograph chapter abstract and metadata
Context in the Sayings Collections
Stuart Weeks
Oxford University Press, in Early Israelite Wisdom, 2000
Supports: Abstract-level control for the dispute over individual-saying, small-cluster, and collection context; no uninspected detailed claim.
Exact location: Weeks, ‘Context in the Sayings Collections,’ Early Israelite Wisdom (2000), official abstract and chapter pp. 20-40; methodological question applied to Proverbs 14:10–14
Open source ↗