This verse sits inside the aside on scoffers and the wise, Proverbs 9:7–12, and closes the frame that 1:7 opened.
Quick answer
The book's foundation, stated a second time as Collection I ends. Wisdom starts with a right relation to God, not with information.
Read the whole unit
Six verses sit between the two banquets, and they are not obviously about either one. They are about who can be taught. Correct a scoffer and you collect insults; correct a wise man and he loves you for it. Give instruction to the wise and he gets wiser. Then the book's motto returns, and the section closes with a line about bearing your own outcome.
On the placement. Interpreters have long noticed that these verses interrupt the two-banquet structure, and some treat them as displaced or inserted. This catalog treats them as their own unit standing where they stand, and reading them in place, they do real work: between two invitations that sound identical, the book pauses to talk about what makes a person able to hear at all. The question the banquets pose is which voice you answer. The question this section poses is whether you are someone who can still be told anything.
On verses 7 and 8, which get misused. "Do not correct a scoffer" is not permission to avoid criticism, and it is not a label to hang on someone whose challenge you would rather not answer. The scoffer in this book is defined by a settled posture of contempt toward correction itself, not by disagreeing with you. Using this verse to dismiss a person is the single most common misreading, and it is self-serving in an obvious way, because the one thing a scoffer would most like is a verse that ends the conversation. Read honestly, verse 8's real force is in its second half: rebuke a wise man and he will love you. The test the section proposes is not whether you can identify scoffers. It is how you take being told you are wrong.
On verse 10. The book's motto returns here in a second form, and it closes Collection I where 1:7 opened it. What the fear of the LORD actually means is defined by the book itself at 8:13, and it is not dread: it is hating what is evil, an aversion to what harms rather than terror of God.
What this verse contributes
This verse brackets the whole opening of the book. Chapter 1:7 said the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; here, at the close of the same collection, it is the beginning of wisdom, and the Hebrew even uses a different word for "beginning" in each place. What matters most is what the phrase means, and the book has already defined it for us: at 8:13, the fear of the LORD is to hate evil. So this is not a verse about being frightened of God. It describes an orientation, a person whose loves and aversions have been set right, and the claim is that everything else called wisdom grows from there.
Why translations differ
The phrase rendered "the Holy One" is plural in form in the Hebrew. Translations generally take it as a plural of majesty referring to God, which is why English versions read "the Holy One" or "the Holy One of Israel," and a few render it "holy ones" or "the Holy." The sense of the line is unaffected, since the parallel with "the fear of the LORD" in the first half points the phrase at God either way.
Related: Proverbs 1:7 · Proverbs 8:13 · Job 28:28
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.