What is the difference between wisdom and knowledge?

Across traditions, the distinction is less about how much a person has learned and more about what they do with it. The Hebrew Bible keeps the two side by side and ranks them: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs 1:7), yet a few chapters later insists “wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom” (Proverbs 4:7) — knowledge is a starting point, wisdom (chokmah) is the applied skill of living well that knowledge alone doesn't guarantee. Confucius drew a similarly practical line in the Analects: “When you know a thing, to hold that you know it; and when you do not know a thing, to allow that you do not know it — this is knowledge” (2.17). For Confucius, admitting the limits of one's knowledge is itself already closer to wisdom than confidently possessing facts. Socrates, in Plato's Apology, made the same move the foundation of his entire method: the Delphic oracle called him the wisest man in Athens, he concluded, only because he alone recognized that he knew nothing worth knowing — other men mistook their knowledge for wisdom and never questioned it. The common thread is that knowledge is accumulative and can be transferred by teaching facts, while wisdom is more like a craft: it has to be exercised in real situations, under uncertainty, often after getting it wrong first. A person can memorize every ethical rule in a tradition's texts and still act foolishly in the moment that matters, while someone with far less formal learning can read a situation correctly and respond well. That gap — between having information and knowing what to do with it — is what nearly every tradition considered here uses the word “wisdom” to name.