This verse closes the prologue of the Sayings of the Wise, Proverbs 22:17–21.
Quick answer
The prologue's final purpose: certainty you can hand to someone else. Truth learned well enough to be relied on, and carried back accurately to whoever sent you.
Read the whole unit
At 22:17 the book changes voice. Solomon's one-line sayings give way to a new collection, the Sayings of the Wise (22:17–24:22), and it opens the way the father's lectures opened: incline your ear, apply your heart. The five-verse prologue names its goal with unusual directness, and the goal is not information: "so that your trust may be in the LORD" (v. 19). Everything that follows, warnings about the poor, anger, surety, landmarks, and tables, serves that single stated purpose.
One honest note belongs here, once. Verse 20 in the NKJV reads "excellent things"; many modern translations read "thirty sayings," reflecting a different understanding of a difficult Hebrew word, and scholars have long noticed that this collection resembles a numbered anthology, with an Egyptian parallel (the Instruction of Amenemope) often discussed alongside it. The exact division into thirty is disputed, and nothing in the teaching depends on settling it. This catalog follows common English-edition divisions, and no entry in the collection relitigates the question; this paragraph is its one home.
What this verse contributes
This verse completes the prologue's chain: attention (v. 17) became keeping (v. 18), keeping became trust (v. 19), and trust in written counsel (v. 20) now becomes certainty, words of truth solid enough to stand on and report. The closing scene is an ancient errand: a messenger sent to learn something must return with an answer his senders can stake decisions on. Wisdom's endpoint is not private enrichment but reliability, becoming the kind of person whose account of the truth can be trusted by the people who are counting on you to bring it home.
Related: Proverbs 25:13 · Luke 1:3–4 · Colossians 4:6
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.