This verse closes the interlude poem, Proverbs 3:13–20.
Quick answer
God's knowledge runs the waters: the deep springs that broke open and the dew that settles overnight. Creation's largest convulsions and its smallest kindnesses, one wisdom.
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
The pair of scales is the teaching. "The depths broken up" recalls the great primordial waters; "clouds drop down the dew" is as small and quiet as a morning, and for a farming reader dew was survival, moisture arriving silently in a dry land. Nothing is too vast for wisdom and nothing too ordinary, and the implication returns to the listener: a wisdom that manages oceans and dewdrops can manage the scale of one human life.
Related: Genesis 7:11 · Job 38:8–28 · Psalm 65:9–13
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.