English gives us one word for knowledge and it does almost nothing. Da'at is the noun built on yada, and yada is the verb Scripture uses when a man knows his wife. That is not a euphemism the translators were embarrassed by. It is the shape of the word. To know something in Hebrew is to have entered it, been changed by it, and taken responsibility for it.

Set that beside the Greek-derived idea of knowledge that runs underneath Western education, information a mind possesses and can hold at arm's length, and you can see what happens to a man who has read a great deal and entered none of it. Hosea 4:6 says my people are destroyed for lack of da'at, and the destruction is not intellectual. Hosea 6:6 puts da'at of God in the same line as chesed and above burnt offerings.

Proverbs 1:7 tells you where it starts, and it is not the library. The fear of HaShem is the reshit, the beginning, of da'at. Posture first. Everything else stacks on that, and if the posture is crooked the stack is crooked no matter how high it gets.