This verse sits inside the interlude poem, Proverbs 3:13–20.
Quick answer
Wisdom is pictured with full hands: long life in her right, riches and honor in her left. What she was just valued above, she turns out to carry.
Read the whole unit
Between the chapter's two lectures, it pauses to sing. This eight-verse interlude is a poem in two movements. The first (vv. 13–18) is framed by happiness: it opens "Happy is the man who finds wisdom" and closes "happy are all who retain her," and between those bookends it prices wisdom against everything an ancient reader valued, silver, gold, rubies, long life, riches, honor, and finds the market unable to match her. The closing image reaches all the way back to Eden: she is "a tree of life to those who take hold of her." The second movement (vv. 19–20) changes the register entirely: the same wisdom the son is urged to find is the wisdom by which the LORD founded the earth and established the heavens. That is the poem's quiet astonishment. The thing being offered to an ordinary young man is the very principle by which the world was made. Wisdom is not a study aid; she is woven into the architecture of reality, which is exactly why living against her is living against the grain of everything.
What this verse contributes
This verse resolves the poem's apparent tension: if wisdom is better than riches, must the wise be poor? No: the goods the auction dismissed reappear in wisdom's own hands. Seek the gold and you may miss both it and her; seek her and what her hands hold tends to follow, the same order Jesus taught in Matthew 6:33. Even her generosity keeps its ranking, length of days in the hand of priority, and as always her gifts describe the ordinary grain of a wise life, not guaranteed terms.
Related: Proverbs 22:4 · Matthew 6:33
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.