This verse is the first keystone of the sentence-poem of Proverbs 2.
The first "then": the search ends in understanding the fear of the LORD and finding the knowledge of God. The treasure at the bottom of the mine is God Himself.
The father's lecture on searching for wisdom is one long sentence, a 22-verse poem built like an arch. It rises on conditions: if you receive my words, if you incline your ear, if you cry out, if you seek her as silver and search as for hidden treasure (vv. 1–4). It reaches its keystone twice: then you will understand the fear of the LORD and find the knowledge of God (v. 5), then you will understand righteousness, justice, equity, every good path (v. 9). And between the two thens sits the verse that keeps the whole structure from becoming a wage agreement: for the LORD gives wisdom (v. 6). The seeking is real and strenuous, mining vocabulary, digging and crying out, and what the seeker finds at the bottom of the mine is not a wage but a Giver, handing over freely what no digging could manufacture. Seek like it depends on the search; receive like the gift it was all along. That is the poem's deep architecture, and the second half shows what the gift does once it arrives: wisdom entering the heart posts two guards, discretion and understanding (vv. 10–11), who deliver the young man from the two great predators of chapters 1 through 9, the perverse man who loves crooked paths (vv. 12–15) and the seductress who has abandoned covenant (vv. 16–19). The poem ends where Israel's hopes always end, in the land: the upright dwell and remain; the wicked are cut off and uprooted (vv. 20–22). Because the chapter is one sentence, no verse in it stands alone, and every member entry below reads its verse as one stone in this arch.
This verse contributes the poem's first summit, and a reversal worth slowing down for. The book's motto said the fear of the LORD is where knowledge begins (1:7); this verse says the fear of the LORD is also what the seeker comes to understand, the trailhead turns out to be the summit too. Reverence is both wisdom's precondition and its prize, deepening as you climb. And the search's final object is startlingly personal: not principles but "the knowledge of God," acquaintance with Him, the relational knowing this book's warmest vocabulary carries (3:6). The son set out digging for discernment and struck relationship. That is the poem's honest advertising about where wisdom's road actually goes: not to mastery, to Someone.
Related: Proverbs 1:7 · Proverbs 9:10 · Jeremiah 9:23–24
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.