Opens Agur's confession, Proverbs 30:1–6, and the whole of Collection VI.
Quick answer
A new author is introduced, and the introduction raises more questions than it settles. Who Agur was, who he was speaking to, and what the title word means are all genuinely uncertain.
Read the whole unit
Six verses in which a man states that he has no wisdom, asks six questions nobody can answer, and then says the only thing he is sure of: God's words are tested, and you must not add to them.
Read the whole unit
A new voice takes over the book here, and almost everything about him is uncertain. Agur son of Jakeh is named nowhere else in scripture. His father is unknown. The two words the NKJV reads as the names Ithiel and Ucal can be divided differently in the Hebrew consonants, which is why English versions differ so widely at verse 1, and the header word הַמַּשָּׂא can be read as a place name or as the ordinary word for an oracle. He may not have been an Israelite at all. The book of Proverbs, which has spent twenty-nine chapters teaching the fear of the LORD, hands six verses to a man whose credentials cannot be checked.
Then he opens by saying he has none. Verses 2 and 3 are not modesty. They are a denial: he did not learn wisdom, he does not have the knowledge of the Holy One, he is duller than any man. And the phrase he uses in verse 3 is the exact phrase 9:10 used for what wisdom hands you. He is standing in the wisdom book saying he does not have the wisdom book's prize.
Verse 4 explains why. Six questions, all rhetorical, all with the same answer: nobody here. Who went up to heaven and came back down, who held the wind, who tied up the water, who set the edges of the earth. The questions are Job's questions from the whirlwind and Isaiah's questions in chapter 40, and they arrive at the same place. Then the last question turns strange, asking not only for God's name but for His son's, and daring the reader to supply either.
And having established that he knows nothing, Agur says the one thing he does know. Verse 5: God's own speech has been tested and it holds. Verse 6: so do not put words in His mouth. That is the entire confession. A man with no credentials, no training and no claim ends up in the only position that was ever safe, which is holding on to what God actually said and refusing to improve it. The wisdom book's most humiliating opening produces its plainest doctrine of scripture, and the order is not an accident.
What this verse contributes
The frame, and the uncertainty. Agur and Jakeh appear nowhere else in the Bible. The word the NKJV translates his utterance is הַמַּשָּׂא, which ordinarily means an oracle or a burden and which some read instead as a place, making Agur a man of Massa and probably not an Israelite. Ithiel and Ucal are read as names here; the same consonants have been divided into ordinary words by other translators, which is why the versions diverge more at this verse than almost anywhere in Proverbs.
None of that is hidden, and none of it needs solving to read the chapter. What it does establish is that the book is about to quote an outsider, at length, without apology. The fear of the LORD is not the property of the people who have the pedigree.
Why translations differ
Three separate cruxes land in one verse: whether הַמַּשָּׂא is "oracle" or "Massa," whether the following words are two personal names or a sentence, and how to punctuate the result. The Hebrew is written without the divisions English needs, so the versions are not disagreeing about the text but about where the words end. This is a place to report the disagreement and decline to settle it. Nothing in the chapter's teaching depends on the answer.
Related: Proverbs 31:1 · Proverbs 22:17
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.