This verse opens the lecture on wisdom handed down, Proverbs 4:1–9, where the father passes on his own father's teaching.
Quick answer
A father calls his children, all of them this time, to hear instruction and to lean in for understanding. Listening in this book is never passive; it is attention with intent.
Read the whole unit
The lecture on wisdom handed down is the only one where the father steps aside and lets an older voice speak. He begins by addressing his children, plural this time, and then reaches back a generation: when I was my father's son, tender and the only one in my mother's sight, he taught me too. From verse 4 the lecture becomes a quotation, and as the NKJV punctuates it, the grandfather's voice carries all the way through verse 9. So the son is hearing his grandfather through his father, and that is the lecture's real argument before it makes any other: this wisdom is not one man's opinion. It is an heirloom, tested across generations, handed down the way land or a name is handed down. What the heirloom says is startlingly single-minded. Get wisdom. The verb is the marketplace word for acquiring, and it hammers through the speech four times, joined by warmer verbs as the speech builds: do not forsake her, love her, exalt her, embrace her. Wisdom is spoken of as a bride to be cherished, not a course to be completed, and the promised return runs the same direction: she will preserve, keep, promote, honor, and finally crown. The lecture asks one generation's most valuable possession to become the next generation's first pursuit.
What this verse contributes
This verse widens the audience and sets the lecture's key word. "Instruction" is the Hebrew musar, the discipline-as-training word this book has used for the whole project of forming a person since 1:2, and here it is called "the instruction of a father," which the next two verses will take literally: this father was somebody's son first. The plural "children" quietly signals that what follows is family property, meant for every ear in the house.
Related: Proverbs 1:8–9 · Deuteronomy 6:6–7
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.