This verse sits inside the numerical saying on what the LORD hates, Proverbs 6:16–19.
Quick answer
The first three, and they escalate fast: an expression, a sentence, a killing. The list starts with a face and reaches a corpse in one verse.
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 begins the anatomy, and the order is worth watching. The NKJV footnotes the first item as literally haughty eyes, so the list opens with something no one could prosecute, a look. Then speech, then violence. Placing arrogance first is a considered choice rather than a mild start, because the posture that treats another person as beneath you is the one that makes the other two thinkable. The book says elsewhere that pride goes before destruction (16:18), and the same conviction underlies its placement here. What arrives last in this verse is what the first item eventually permits.
Related: Proverbs 16:18 · Proverbs 3:34 · James 4:6
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.