I would let you cut off my hands and feet before I would let you take from me what I learned under the teaching of Daniel Fuller at Fuller Seminary. Not because I value the words of men but because his words opened the Word for me like no one ever had. That's not the meaning of the proverb. The book of Proverbs summons everyone to get knowledge and speak wisdom. Knowledge is valuable to have first of all because life and death are at stake.
People perish for lack of knowledge.
They stumble along in the darkness of their daily lives and wake up to find themselves rejected by God. People can be kept out of the Kingdom of God because they lack knowledge. So it follows doesn't it, that if the Kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in a field which a man sells all he has to buy, then the knowledge which we need to enter that Kingdom will also be worth more than all the material things in the world, which is what the Proverb says. Life and death are at stake. But not only that, knowledge is valuable to have secondly because just life is at stake.