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Proverbs 19:13–16, King James Version
Italic words were supplied in the English translation for clarity.
Proverbs 19:13–16
Family teaching, responsibility, and mutual care — A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the…
A foolish child is calamity; a quarreling spouse is a leak that will not quit
A foolish son is a father's calamity, and a wife's contentions are a continual dripping. House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers; a prudent wife is from the LORD. Continual dripping is household water-damage: strife that never dries. The saying names a real misery. It is not a warrant to mute a wife who is telling the truth, not a one-gender diagnosis of conflict, and not permission to answer a leak with harm. A prudent spouse as the LORD's gift honors wisdom in marriage without making every unmarried house unblessed.
Sloth sinks into a deep sleep; keeping a commandment keeps a life
Slothfulness casts into a deep sleep, and an idle soul will suffer hunger. Whoever keeps the commandment keeps their own soul; whoever despises their ways will die. Sleep here is the stupor of refused work, not a medical sleep disorder and not a taunt at the exhausted. Hunger is ordinary consequence, not a verdict on every empty table. Soul-keeping is obedience, not a technique. Despising your way is contempt for the path itself.
How this should shape us
Stop the drip of contempt inside a house, including your own. Honor a prudent spouse as a gift, not as a possession. Wake up to the work that feeds, keep the commandment that keeps you, and do not call a hungry person idle without evidence.
Teach it back
Explain Proverbs 19:13–16 in your own words. Identify its form and collection, trace one line from role through contextual meaning and enduring truth to application, name one uncertainty, and reject one misuse explicitly.
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Go deeper
The explanation above is meant to stand on its own. Open these notes only if you want language, history, disagreements, or source locations.
Where careful interpreters disagreeThe strongest options and their difficulties
Where do careful readers disagree?
Best judgment: Interpreters disagree over how much literary meaning adjacent sentence sayings gain from small clusters. This package treats Proverbs 19:13–16 as a useful local cluster while preserving each saying's independent force and marking the boundary as revisable.
How certain? probableResearch trail and exact locationsThe source record behind this section
Supports: Exact displayed KJV words, canonical order, paragraph flags, supplied-word markup, and complete unit coverage.
Proverbs 19:13–16, repository-pinned eng-kjv2006 USFM-derived corpus
Supports: Masoretic Hebrew wording and morphology used only for the exact unit's lexical, grammatical, parallel, superscription, number-saying, and acrostic questions.
Open Scriptures MorphHB v2.2, commit 6a5db284c715c18b239422e57bb89684e6a19f00, wlc/Prov.xml, OSIS 19:13-19:16
Supports: Verse-attached textual, lexical, grammatical, syntactic, parallelism, and older-English controls for the exact range.
NET Bible Proverbs PDF, printed pp. 1136-1140, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 19:13–16
Supports: Whole-book and collection orientation, local commentary, social-setting proposals, and named interpretation limits.
Aitken, ‘Proverbs,’ Oxford Bible Commentary, printed pp. 405-422, subsection covering 19:13–16 and the First Solomonic sentence-saying collection outline
Supports: Abstract-level control for the dispute over individual-saying, small-cluster, and collection context; no uninspected detailed claim.
Weeks, ‘Context in the Sayings Collections,’ Early Israelite Wisdom (2000), official abstract and chapter pp. 20-40; methodological question applied to Proverbs 19:13–16
Supports: Feminist and literary review of Wisdom, Folly, Strange Woman, mothers, wives, women in sentence sayings, and the closing woman of strength.
Hartwell, Wisdom, strange or somewhere in between (Birmingham PhD, 2017), pp. 13-25, 132-171, 172-204, 205-244, and 245-260 as relevant to the gendered figures and sayings in Proverbs 19:13–16
Sources for This Section
These records identify the source, the claim it supports, and the exact location used. A source remains evidence to evaluate; it does not replace the biblical text.
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 19:13–16, 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 19:13-19:16
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. 1136-1140, exact tc/tn/sn entries attached to 19:13–16
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 19:13–16 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 19:13–16
Open source ↗open access doctoral thesis
Wisdom, strange or somewhere in between: in search of a real woman in the Book of Proverbs
Jeanette May Hartwell
University of Birmingham, 2017
Supports: Feminist and literary review of Wisdom, Folly, Strange Woman, mothers, wives, women in sentence sayings, and the closing woman of strength.
Exact location: Hartwell, Wisdom, strange or somewhere in between (Birmingham PhD, 2017), pp. 13-25, 132-171, 172-204, 205-244, and 245-260 as relevant to the gendered figures and sayings in Proverbs 19:13–16
Open source ↗