Verse Lens · Context pointer
Proverbs 20:16 Explained in Context
Use this verse as a doorway into the larger passage—not as an isolated saying.
Verse 16. 16Take his garment that is surety for a stranger: and take a pledge of him for a strange woman.
King James Version — public domain in the United States · Bible text and permissions
Role in This Section
This verse opens with “Take his garment that is surety for a stranger” and develops the line through “and take a pledge of him for a strange woman”.
Read It With
- Proverbs 20:14–17
Read Proverbs 20:16 with 20:14–17. Read alone, “Take his garment that is surety for a stranger: and take a…” could turn a compressed observation, warning, comparison, or command into a guarantee or complete policy. The full unit establishes: uses contrastive parallelism to place “It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer” against “when he is gone his way, then he boasteth”; by 20:17, it uses contrastive parallelism to place “Bread of deceit is sweet to a man” against “afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel”. Together the unit concentrates on wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power, speech, listening, truth, and relational consequence, wisdom, folly, teachability, and moral perception within “First Solomonic sentence-saying collection.”
Why It Needs Context
The line's necessary work is contextual: it opens with “Take his garment that is surety for a stranger” and develops the line through “and take a pledge of him for a strange woman”. The surrounding unit supplies the comparison, affected people, and outcome required for interpretation.
Continue in Context
Read the complete section for the connected explanation and how it should shape life. This verse is a doorway into that passage, not a saying that stands alone.
Read Proverbs 20:14–17 — Wealth, poverty, provision, and economic power — It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer: but when he…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 20:14–17, 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 20:14-20:17
Open source ↗