Proverbs 12:4 ('A good wife is the crown of her husband') treats a woman as her husband's accessory or possession.

'Crown' (Heb. *ateret*) is not an object-of-ownership metaphor in biblical usage; it is one of the highest honor-metaphors in the Hebrew Bible, used of glory, dignity, and exalted status — applied to old age (Prov 16:31), to grandchildren (Prov 17:6), to wisdom itself (Prov 4:9), and, in explicitly reciprocal and elevated form, of God's own relationship to his people (Isa 62:3, Israel as 'a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD') and of the reward of the righteous (2 Tim 4:8, 'the crown of righteousness'). Being someone's 'crown' in this idiom is high praise, not property language — it says the wife's virtue elevates and glorifies her husband, exactly as Proverbs 31:10-31 (the same book's extended acrostic poem, 'a woman of valor/strength,' *eshet chayil* — the same word *chayil* used of mighty warriors) devotes its most sustained praise in the entire book to an independently capable, economically active, publicly respected woman who trades, invests, manages a household enterprise, and is praised 'in the gates' (the public civic assembly) by her own works. Wisdom literature is a genre of paired, often gendered aphorisms describing an idealized well-ordered household from multiple angles (see the parallel and equally strong statement about a bad husband's effect on a household, e.g. Prov 21:9, 19); reading one half-verse in isolation from the book's fuller treatment of capable, honored women misreads the genre.

Proverbs 31's praise of the *eshet chayil* is arguably one of the most positive, capability-affirming portraits of a woman in ancient Near Eastern literature — she is praised for business acumen, strength, wisdom in speech, and provision for her household and the poor, not merely for adorning her husband; read together with Prov 12:4, the picture is of mutual honor, not asymmetric ownership.