After three chapters focused primarily on the temptations of the foreign woman (chs. 5–7), Proverbs 8 introduces the longest poem in the book, the speech of Woman Wisdom. This chapter combines features of wisdom from two places earlier in Proverbs. First, the chapter is in effect the full autobiographical portrait and testimony of Woman Wisdom from 1:20–33. In addition to other similarities, both women speak in public, both promise life, and both oppose folly. Second, one could label 3:13–20 as “Wisdom’s Full Profile, Part I.” This is Part II. The earlier profile described wisdom as essential to Yahweh’s design for the creation. But wisdom was not personified there. In this second profile, however, both presentations merge: wisdom is personified and is found alongside and within creation.

The heart of this autobiographical section goes to great lengths to describe the order God has woven into creation (8:22–29). The description peaks as the woman places herself before the creation with God (vv. 30–31). The passage holds many parallels to the NT, such as Jesus as wisdom and Jesus as with the Father before creation (John 1:1–14; Col. 1:15–20; Heb. 1:2). These parallels have been part of long and often heated debates about Christology—the nature, origins, and work of the second person of the Trinity. These issues are addressed in the comments and the Response section. The outer folds of the poem (Prov. 8:1–21, 32–36) describe wisdom’s practical credentials for issues of life, health, righteousness, governance, and safety.

The poem divides neatly into four sections:

  I.N.  Fourth Interlude: Wisdom on the Heights (8:1–36)

1.  Wisdom’s Call and Incomparable Worth (8:1–11)

2.  Wisdom’s Help in Life from A to Z (8:12–21)

3.  Wisdom’s Origins at the Beginning with God (8:22–31)

4.  Wisdom’s Love Story: With God and Humanity (8:32–36)

Imagination Stirs Our Love for Wisdom

It is common for Christians to let their children celebrate secular forms of holidays: to dress up for Halloween, believe in Santa Claus, and hope for the Easter bunny to fill their baskets with chocolate sweets. But how many children believe in Woman Wisdom? This is an absurd question on the surface, at least as I imagined it when I talked with one of my children. But then I noticed how readily I encourage my children’s imaginations in everything from holidays and video games to future dreams for life. All these things provoke children to venture into the imaginative unseen world, whether evil spirits, the mysteries of hope and generosity, or the new beginning of life after a long winter. This gift of imagination becomes increasingly necessary in order for children to mature into their Christian lives, to commit to a faith in what cannot be empirically proved, a mystery of what surpasses human knowledge, a love that is not measured on a scale, and a hope for things that cannot be seen.

Still, most of us somehow fail to inculcate our children into the full imagination packed into the poetry of the Bible. I am often intrigued in this light at how the college students I teach get caught up in the presentations of the women in Proverbs, perplexed by their vagueness and ambiguity. Was there really someone helping God at creation? Was it Jesus? Was it the Holy Spirit? It seems as if these students have forgotten how to imagine and how to meditate on a grand mystery. Or else someone convinced them along the way to shut down the imagination when they opened their Bibles—call it the modern unbalanced emphasis on STEM.77 At moments like these I am reminded that this poetry is meant to get us to reflect on those things in the world that are easily overlooked, immeasurable, or taken for granted.

I would like to have filled the minds of my own children with a vision of the woman who was with God at the beginning—to picture her advising great kings and queens, to see her coming into being before the creation. and to think of her as dancing when the world first took shape. That woman’s overwhelming desire is to come alongside young men and women and guide them into lives of joy, blessing, and the love of the Lord and the gift of his wisdom.

Of course, the renewing of the imagination is not contrary to or at the cost of truth and moral authority. Indeed, “love” in our age has become an imaginary idea that has no real moral traction apart from feeling good and letting things be. The love and wonder in this chapter are nothing like that. They arise from the goodness of the moral and natural order in God’s world.

So too should our worship be a place of deep imagination that renews our sense of the fullness of the gospel. J. Todd Billings has argued in this light that the Lord’s Supper is indispensable for Christians for the way in which it provokes just this kind of imagination.78 Not unlike the image of Woman Wisdom, the Lord’s Supper reminds us that God has condescended to us in the incarnate Christ. He has become one of us, borne our sins, forgiven us, and united us to himself in his eternal resurrection. In the Supper we eat one loaf and drink one cup to become one body in him—to taste of the riches of the gifts of kingdom with thanksgiving. All of that is contained in a sacred, mystery-filled meal.

Discerning the Way of Justice

Proverbs 8 offers a vision of prospering nations’ relying on Woman Wisdom to guide political rulers (vv. 15–21). She is described as “filling their treasuries” (v. 21), which sounds a lot like the modern health and wealth gospel (e.g., Joel Osteen), which makes fantastic promises of prosperity and physical health. Brent Strawn has called this type of reading of the OT “happiology” because of its narrow use of a few biblical passages to support a shallow idea about human life and flourishing.79

This reminds us to look at the full biblical picture of human faith and works and material blessings that come from God. When we actually take in the whole of Proverbs, we can appreciate the book’s habit of accenting the two ways: wisdom versus folly, righteous versus wicked, life versus death. These opposing pairs have a rhetorical power to discourage us from living as moral relativists and lazy human beings; the smallest decisions can lead to vastly different ends. But we can also see that Proverbs recognizes the contradictions in life, that these two ways often fail to play out as expected (e.g., 13:23; 16:8, 19; 28:11, 15–16). Further still, we read of the extreme violence threatened against the foolish (e.g., 1:18–19, 26–33; 2:18–19; 6:27–28) even though folly does not always, or even usually, meet such extreme consequences in this world.

With even this brief overview of Proverbs we can see that the rhetorical language in this chapter plays the role of catching the reader’s attention and accentuating the benefits of wisdom, especially in those cases in which the costs might seem very low—if wisdom always resulted in wealth and folly always ended in death, there would be less need of a dramatic argument.

Likewise, kings and rulers who seek wisdom to rule their people and their realms would be naïve to think that physical riches and uncontested justice will automatically result from their actions. The point is that even when wealth and favor do not follow, rulers can and should be assured that they are governing in ways that align with the deeper order of creation.

Those ways, according to Woman Wisdom, are those of justice. In fact the word used for “just” and “justly” (8:15–16) is the same word Woman Wisdom uses for “righteous” in verse 8. In none of these cases does Woman Wisdom stop to tell us what justice is. Much of that comes later (cf. Proverbs 24). Instead, her aim is to capture our interest and devotion before turning to those specific teachings in chapters 10–31, grounding those teachings in the material order God has designed into the whole universe.

Woman Wisdom and Jesus

Is Woman Wisdom Jesus, or is she something else? These questions arise from the language in the Nicene Creed, which affirms that Jesus was “begotten, not made.” As noted in the comment on 8:22–31 and in the Introduction (cf. Introduction: Relationship to the Rest of the Bible and to Christ), the difference between “begotten” and “made” makes little difference so long as we are concerned only with Woman Wisdom; in either case she is the expert witness in God’s work of creation and fully qualified in her role as our teacher.

But then again, she is a literary device, filling in for a larger mystery. Matters become more complex and significant when it comes to Jesus’ own nature and origins. The ancient author(s) of chapter 8 used biblical figures of speech to capture the mysterious way in which God created the world in a partnership internal to his nature. The authors of Proverbs might not have fully understood the Trinity—and certainly not the incarnation—but were inspired to write about something that surpasses this metaphorical woman to speak about those very relations within God.80

In any case the ancient church chose the language of begetting and making, or creating, to set Jesus apart from mere humans in an important way. “Begotten” serves as a metaphor for sexual reproduction, in which the child is actually like the parents, sharing their nature. Things that are “made,” like works of culture, are objects of creation (e.g., houses, gardens, pottery, paintings) and different and distinct from their maker. Thus according to the ancient creeds Jesus was eternally begotten and so “of one Being with the Father.” We could also say that Jesus is ontologically one with the Father and Spirit, whereas human creatures are things he has made in his image and remain distinct. We reflect God’s nature but do not share his identity in the way Jesus does.

The NT authors and the early church drew on Proverbs 8:22 as a passage about Jesus’ incarnation and on 8:25 as speaking to his eternally begotten nature.81 Modern interpretation has forgotten this ancient habit of reading Proverbs 8 as speaking about Jesus, instead viewing the chapter typologically—Jesus is like Woman Wisdom, who was something independent of God. Yet Emerson shows that passages such as John 1:1–3; 1 Corinthians 1:24, 30; and Hebrews 1:1–4 draw on Proverbs 8:22–25 to speak to Jesus’ eternal generation. It was Jesus who was there, not some fictive woman.82 Woman Wisdom does not merely symbolize Jesus; her whole existence explains him.83

The effort to recognize Jesus as the anticipated object in this passage retains the fullness of gospel hope. We need this, for the church constantly tends to reduce our good news to one aspect of the gospel or another: forgiveness, sanctification, justification, grace, or new life. But Proverbs 8 holds these all together. Jesus is the eternal creator with the Father and Spirit—outside the world—and the Incarnate One who becomes Wisdom for us within creation. Jesus represents the link between this created world and the Trinity, making it possible for finite, time-bound, and fallen creatures to share in the eternal life of God in eternity. In this way his eternal begetting and his incarnate birth are necessary for salvation.

Now united with Christ, we live in an age of hope for our physical resurrection (Rom. 5:5). This comes with a promise of the perfect unity of the church in him—a vision that echoes Wisdom’s dancing, love, and joy at the goodness of the created world and its creatures (Prov. 8:30–36). As such, Good Friday ends the old world and its decay, vanquishing evil and eliminating human suffering. But Easter Sunday begins a new creation and the gift of “life” to our “mortal bodies” in which we now live (Rom. 8:11).Proverbs 8

Proverbs 9