Verse explainer
Self-confidence and the fear of God can't fully coexist — this verse sets them as opposites, not complements.
Be not wise in thine own eyes: fear the LORD, and depart from evil.
BSBBe not wise in your own eyes; fear the LORD and turn away from evil.
The plain meaning
The proverb sits inside Solomon's extended appeal to his son to trust God's guidance rather than his own instincts (vv. 5-6 just before: "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding"). Verse 7 names the inner attitude that makes such trust impossible: the conviction that you already know enough. Being "wise in your own eyes" isn't the same as being confident or capable; it's the closed posture that stops a person from fearing God and therefore from turning away from evil. The two imperatives — fear the LORD, depart from evil — are presented as one movement, not two separate duties. Gill's reading is apt: where genuine fear of God is present, humility follows naturally; where self-conceit reigns, real wisdom is absent no matter how clever the person. Matthew Henry adds a practical edge: the proverb promises a kind of bodily and inward health to those who live this way (v. 8), suggesting that the peace of a conscience rightly ordered before God carries real-world fruit.
The common misreading
What the commentators say
Henry treats self-conceit as the single greatest enemy of genuine religion — the attitude that makes a person think it beneath them to be governed by God's rules. For him, the two commands (fear the LORD, depart from evil) are inseparable: true fear of God is always a humble subjection that expresses itself in moral departure from evil, never a merely intellectual acknowledgment of God's existence alongside confidence in one's own judgment.
Gill identifies being "wise in one's own eyes" as acting independently of God — not seeking him, not heeding others, and in religious matters thinking oneself wiser than Scripture. He pairs it with the observation that what people are most conceited about is usually not wisdom at all but folly, and draws on Romans 11:20 and Isaiah 5:21 to show the pattern is consistent across both Testaments. Fear of God, for Gill, directly opposes pride and produces real humility.
JFB keeps their note terse but pointed, cross-referencing Proverbs 27:2 and Romans 12:16 to frame the verse as part of a sustained biblical pattern: the person who is wise in their own eyes is exhibiting precisely the disposition Scripture warns against throughout. Their gloss on "fear … evil" ties reverential regard for God's law directly to the practical recoil from evil — the two cannot be separated.
The word behind it
"Wise" — the standard Hebrew word for wisdom, skill, or shrewdness. The phrase is literally "wise in your own eyes," where "eyes" signals subjective self-assessment. Gesenius notes that chakam carries the sense of expert mastery; the irony here is that the very quality that is praised throughout Proverbs is condemned when it turns inward and becomes self-referential rather than God-oriented. Wisdom that reports back to itself instead of to God is, by this verse's logic, no longer wisdom.
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