This verse closes the numerical saying on what the LORD hates, Proverbs 6:16–19, and the seventh item is the one the whole list was built to reach.
Quick answer
The climax, and it is not murder or violence. The thing named last is the person who turns family against family.
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 delivers what the counting formula promised. Six things were named; the seventh is the point, and the seventh is division among people who belong to each other. The two final entries also change shape. Every earlier item was a body part; these are whole persons defined by what they do to a community, one destroying another's standing in court and one destroying the peace between brothers. The phrase repeats verse 14 almost exactly, closing the loop with the portrait of the worthless man, whose last listed trait was the same. The father's assessment and God's turn out to be the same assessment.
What it does not mean
This verse is regularly turned into an accusation, usually against whoever has raised an uncomfortable question, and that use inverts it. Sowing discord is manufacturing division for its own purposes, which is what the four preceding verses described in detail: the winking, the signaling, the continual devising. It is not the same as disagreeing, naming a real problem, asking a hard question, or declining to pretend. A verse against division should never become the instrument that ends a conversation, and using it that way accomplishes precisely what it forbids.
From this side of the cross
The list describes seven ways to injure people, and God's hatred of them is protective rather than punitive: He is against what harms those He loves. For a believer, that is not a new audit. What was settled about our standing was settled at the cross and is not reopened by an inventory of failures. The list still teaches, and its teaching runs outward. These are the fastest ways to wound a neighbor, and love, which fulfills everything the law was reaching for, does not need a list to want them gone.
Related: Proverbs 6:14 · Proverbs 10:12 · Romans 13:8–10
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.