This verse sits inside the lecture on wisdom handed down, Proverbs 4:1–9, in the grandfather's quoted speech, and is one of its most quoted lines.
Quick answer
Wisdom holds first place, so make her your first acquisition. Whatever else your life collects, collect understanding, and put it at the top of the list.
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 is the grandfather's thesis, and its logic is priority: "principal" translates the Hebrew reshit, the word for first, chief, the head of the line, the same word the book's motto uses when it calls the fear of the LORD "the beginning of knowledge" (1:7). What stands first in 1:7 as orientation stands first here as pursuit. The third line applies the ranking to everything else a life will acquire: houses, skills, positions, savings. None of it is condemned; all of it is demoted. A man's gettings need one getting above them, because everything else he owns will be handled either wisely or foolishly.
Why translations differ
The NKJV reads "Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom." Many translations, the NIV among them, read instead "The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom," and the NIV's footnote carries the NKJV's sense as the alternative. Both are honest renderings of the same three Hebrew words, reshit chokmah qeneh: read one way, wisdom is the principal thing to get; read the other, getting wisdom is where wisdom begins, a doorway you enter by deciding to enter. The difference does not change the command, which both readings land on the same verb: get.
Related: Proverbs 1:7 · Proverbs 3:14–15 · Matthew 13:45–46
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.