Verse Lens · Expanded explanation
Proverbs 19:14 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 14. 14House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent wife is from the LORD.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Quick Meaning
This verse opens with “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers” and develops the line through “and a prudent wife is from the LORD”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 19:13–16
Within First Solomonic sentence-saying collection, Proverbs 19:14 opens with “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers” and develops the line through “and a prudent wife is from the LORD”. The immediate unit supplies proportion, affected people, and the transition from meaning to application.
Why This Verse Appears Here
This line follows the unit's earlier saying and prepares its later turn; it opens with “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers” and develops the line through “and a prudent wife is from the LORD”. Its value is contextual rather than slogan-like.
Follow the Context
- Opening (19:13): the unit opens with “A foolish son is the calamity of his father” and develops the line through “and the contentions of a wife are a continual dropping”.
- Development (19:13–16): adjacent lines test family teaching, responsibility, and mutual care, gendered imagery, sexual fidelity, consent, and household agency, reverent accountability before the LORD through parallelism, contrast, motive, image, or consequence.
- Close (19:16): the unit uses contrastive parallelism to place “He that keepeth the commandment keepeth his own soul” against “he that despiseth his ways shall die”, creating the next supported pause.
Phrase-by-Phrase Explanation
“House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent...”
In plain language: reverent accountability before the LORD
This verse opens with “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers” and develops the line through “and a prudent wife is from the LORD”.
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 make a wife property, excuse arranged coercion, or claim that marriage status measures divine approval.
What Remains True
Wisdom begins with reverent accountability to the LORD and refuses to make human insight self-sufficient. In Proverbs 19:14, that bounded truth is expressed through “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers: and a prudent...,” not through a promise detached from its literary form.
How It Can Shape Life
- Bring the decision under truthful worship, moral accountability, and correction rather than using religious language to shield preference or power. For Proverbs 19:14, preserve the sequence: verse role (opens with “House and riches are the inheritance of fathers” and develops the line through “and a prudent wife is from the LORD”) -> contextual meaning in Proverbs 19:13–16 -> proportionate truth -> this accountable response.
Teach It Back
Explain Proverbs 19:14's exact role in Proverbs 19:13–16. Distinguish pattern from guarantee, include “House and riches are the inheritance of...,” name one uncertainty, and explicitly reject one harmful use.
Your explanation stays in this browser. It is not sent or saved.
Continue in Context
The full thought-unit study remains the final contextual authority for this Verse Lens.
Read Proverbs 19:13–16 — Family teaching, responsibility, and mutual care — A foolish son is the calamity of his father: and the...Sources used for this Verse Lens
How certain is this explanation? probable
Where care is needed
The proverb distinguishes inherited property from a prudent spouse understood as divine gift; gift language does not erase the spouse's agency.
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 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 ↗