The Personification of Wisdom

Alice M. Sinnott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138252233
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351884358
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book examines the personification of Wisdom as a female figure - a central motif in Proverbs, Job, Sirach, Wisdom and Baruch. Alice M. Sinnott identifies how and why the complex character of Wisdom was introduced into the Israelite tradition, and created and developed by Israelite/Jewish wisdom teachers and writers. Arguing that by personifying Wisdom the authors of Proverbs responded to Israel's defeat by Babylon and the loss of Davidic monarchy, and by retrieving and transforming the Wisdom figure the authors of Sirach, Baruch and Wisdom responded to the spread of Hellenism and the potential loss of identity for Jews. Sinnott concludes that personified Wisdom functioned to reinterpret and transform the Israelite/Jewish tradition.

Chapter 1
Origins of Personified Wisdom

Introduction

Approaches to understanding the personification of Wisdom are nearly as numerous as are commentators. Recent years have witnessed a rapid increase in interest in the personification of Wisdom. In 1979, J.A. Emerton noted, “a controversial problem of Proverbs 1–9 is that of the origin and meaning of the personified figure of Wisdom”.¹ While scholars have addressed several aspects of personified Wisdom, her origin and function remain mysterious. R.E. Murphy, who over the past four decades has written frequently about the personification of Wisdom, notes, “From a literary-theological point of view, personified Wisdom is simply unequalled in the entire Old Testament.”² Camp, and more recently Whybray, reviewed, in considerable detail, research concerning the personification of Wisdom, so I shall confine my comments in this chapter to works that specifically address issues pertaining to Proverbs 1–9.³ Classifying previous work on this subject inevitably leads to some generalizations and loss of distinct voices. Yet some outline of the landscape is an essential instrument for charting a route through the rich and diverse material available. With this qualification, I shall survey a small sample of critical approaches to the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 1–9. Some of the works examined in this section, while not so well know, are included for what I consider unique insights. Rather than attempting to produce an exhaustive review of literature pertaining to the personification of Wisdom, the aim of this study is to strive for a representative sample that outlines a wide and varied range of interpretations of the Wisdom figure, rather than in-depth appraisals of each scholar’s work. I acknowledge that such a brief overview cannot do justice to how individual scholars nuance their interpretations, and the categorising of these brief outlines into general groupings is of its nature arbitrary. I shall be referring to pertinent studies throughout the book in the relevant chapters.

During the past decades, scholars of personified Wisdom have taken many different approaches, so any strict categorisation tends to distort or misrepresent the work of many scholars. One large group uses approaches usually grouped as historical. Second are those concerned primarily with the origin of personified Wisdom. They use sociological approaches seeing the Wisdom figure as abstracted from the lives of Israelite women and reflecting particular social developments. Those who adopt literary approaches by which they regard the Wisdom figure as a hypostasis or a literary device to portray wisdom as an attribute of God can often be placed in one or both of the above categories. Such studies consider the Wisdom figure to be modelled on one or more ancient Near Eastern deities. Regardless of the approach favoured, scholars have persistently searched for the origins of personified Wisdom. In the first half of the twentieth century Schencke, Reitzenstein, Bultmann, Knox, Boström, Ringgren, and many others, examined biblical and other ancient Near Eastern texts for clues to the development of this biblical figure.⁴ Discussions of the origins of the biblical Wisdom figure are often complicated unnecessarily when texts in which Wisdom is personified are treated together as if all of these books can be understood as of one mind on the matter of personified Wisdom. This study is concerned with the unfolding meanings and functions of the Wisdom figure in the Old Testament. To avoid conflating or confusing developments particular to the Wisdom figure in specific wisdom books I shall focus in this chapter on portrayals of Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs. I shall examine likely sources for evidence of personified Wisdom’s origins. This involves a brief survey of studies of Proverbs 1–9 especially those concerned with the personification of Wisdom. Secondly is a study of biblical texts which portray the emerging and developing phenomenon that is the figure of Wisdom in the Old Testament and lastly there is an exploration of Egyptian and Mesopotamian influences, prototypes, and antecedents that may have contributed to the biblical Wisdom figure.

Historical Approaches

History of religion scholars regard the figure of Wisdom as something strange and enigmatic within the Israelite tradition. They seek to explain the language used to describe this figure by seeing Wisdom solely as an Israelite borrowing of a foreign deity or goddess. Some who have concentrated on perceived historical influences on the emergence and description of personified Wisdom, have proposed various origins, such as that this figure was modelled on a goddess borrowed from neighbouring peoples and demoted to serve as a subordinate to YHWH. Various foreign deities and mythological figures have been proposed as the prototypes of Wisdom. Reitzenstein claimed that the origins of the Wisdom figure lay in the Jewish-Hellenistic Isis-Sophia speculation ultimately based on the Egyptian goddess Isis, but with an admixture of an Iranian element.⁵ Bousset and others, who held the view that Iranian beliefs influenced post-exilic Judaism, suggested that its origins lay in one or other of the Iranian angelic figures known as the Amesha Spentas.⁶ Some other suggested models for Wisdom are Canaanite Asherah, Egyptian Ma’at and Isis, Astarte, or Inanna.⁷ Theories that suggest Wisdom’s dependence on Semitic sources can be traced back in this century to Albright who invoked a vast array of material evidence to support his claim for a “goddess of life and wisdom.”⁸ Schencke, proposed the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, a personification of truth and righteousness, as a partial model for the figure of Wisdom. However, after an examination of all the hypotheses proposed up to his time, he stressed the polytheistic character of pre-exilic Israelite religion and concluded that Wisdom was probably originally a distinct indigenous female deity worshipped side by side with YHWH as one of his consorts. Such worship, he believed, continued to be practised after the exile, but Wisdom was eventually absorbed into official Judaism and became simply a personification of YHWH’ s wisdom. He believed that the figure was influenced by various non-Israelite mythological figures, which could not be identified.⁹ Coogan also proposes ancient Near Eastern goddess connections and suggests that the divine attributes given to the Wisdom figure in Proverbs 1–9, Job 28, and in the Deuterocanonical books are a legitimatisation of the worship of more “established” goddesses in Israel and Judah, such as Asherah.¹⁰ Hadley challenges Coogan’s claim for legitimating the worship of “established” goddesses. She proposes that the apparent apotheosis of Wisdom is a literary compensation for an earlier eradication of the worship of these goddesses.¹¹

Sociological Approaches

Sociological interpretations perceive personified Wisdom as a product of social impulses within Israel that drew upon the lives of Israelite women for their imagery. Foremost among those looking towards an internal origin for the feminine personification of Wisdom is Camp. She addresses the fundamental question of Wisdom’s exalted position as a female figure in Proverbs in association with the notion that the Hebrew Bible generally exhibits a patriarchal perspective. Arguing that Wisdom is based on Israelite women rather than on any ancient Near Eastern goddess, she sees the implied role of Israelite women in Proverbs as reflecting the “kingless sociological configuration of the post-exilic era”, when the family in some respects replaced the monarchy as the “defining element” in society. In her examination of the literary roles of women in the Bible and the relationship of these roles to the social roles of women of the time, Camp questions the potentially misogynist argument for a divine precursor of Wisdom, which ignores the real human role models that might have given rise to personified Wisdom in Israel.¹² Camp pinpoints features present in the Wisdom figure and the “strange or foreign woman” that she claims result from literary traditions about women in society. She concludes that social crises of the post-exilic period provided the impetus for drawing on family-centred imagery to authenticate the wisdom tradition embodied in Proverbs. Arguing that personified Wisdom is an abstraction from female sages and counsellors, she claims that social forces such as renewed emphasis on the home in the post-...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Origins of Personified Wisdom
• 2 Wisdom Responds to a Crisis
• 3 Wisdom, Where Shall She Be Found?
• 4 Wisdom: An Enduring Heritage
• 5 Personified Wisdom as Saviour
• 6 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index