This verse opens the numerical saying on what the LORD hates, Proverbs 6:16–19. The counting formula is a literary device with a specific function.
Quick answer
A headline with a built-in emphasis. The six-then-seven pattern is not imprecision; it is a way of pointing at the last item on the list before the list has even started.
Read the whole unit
This is a numerical saying, a form Proverbs uses again in chapter 30, and the form carries meaning. "Six things, yes seven" is not indecision about the count. The pattern names a number and then goes one past it, which puts the weight on the final item; whatever lands in the seventh slot is the one the saying was built to reach. Here that is the person who sows discord among brothers.
The list is also anatomical. It runs down a body: eyes, tongue, hands, heart, feet, and then two entries that are no longer parts but whole persons, the false witness and the one who divides a community. Nothing here is an abstract vice. Each item is a working part of a human being aimed at another human being.
And it is a portrait we have already met. Three of its terms come straight out of the four verses immediately before it: the word rendered "wicked" at verse 12 reappears in the "wicked plans" of verse 18, the plowing verb behind "devises" in verse 14 is used again in verse 18, and the phrase "sows discord" in verse 14 recurs almost identically at verse 19. The list is not a change of subject after the portrait. It is the same man, itemized, with the note that God shares the father's assessment.
Two things need saying about how this passage gets used.
First, this is not a ranking of sins and it is not a tool for sorting people. Lists of what God hates have a long history of being pointed outward, and every item on this one describes damage done to other human beings, which means using the list to damage other human beings is a genuinely remarkable misfire. The NKJV footnotes verse 16's final phrase as literally His soul, and what that intensity is directed at is conduct that wrecks people, not at a category of person to be identified and excluded.
Second, this is not a mirror for auditing your standing with God. A believer reading it will find, honestly, that pride and a sharp tongue are not foreign territory, and the conclusion to draw from that is not that God's disposition toward them is now in doubt. What is settled about a believer's standing was settled at the cross and is not renegotiated by a list. The list still does real work, but the work is horizontal: these are the seven fastest ways to injure the people around you, and God, who loves them, hates what harms them.
There is a striking echo of this passage in the prophets, where the LORD names truthful speech, just judgment, and refusing to plot against a neighbor, and then says, "For all these are things that I hate" (Zechariah 8:16–17). The concerns line up almost exactly. What God is against, in both places, is what tears the fabric between people.
What this verse contributes
This verse establishes the form, and the form governs how the rest is read. Naming a number and then exceeding it by one is a recognized pattern in Hebrew wisdom, used again through chapter 30, and its effect is to load the final entry. Whatever appears in the seventh position is the destination. The NKJV also footnotes the closing phrase, "an abomination to Him," as literally His soul, which raises the temperature considerably. This is not a policy statement. It is language for something God feels about, and what follows is the itemized reason.
Related: Proverbs 30:18–19 · Zechariah 8:16–17
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.