Personified Wisdom in the Old Testament

Proverbs 8 describes the wisdom of God as a person or entity. Several sections of the chapter illustrate the characterization, particularly through the author’s use of the first person:

To you, O people, I call, and my cry is to the children of humankind. Learn prudence, O simple ones; fools, learn intelligence. Listen! For noble things I will speak, and upright things from the opening of my lips. My mouth will utter truth, and wickedness is an abomination to my lips (Prov 8:4–7).

The writer of Proverbs also employs this characterization elsewhere, such as in Proverbs 1:20–22:

Wisdom calls out in the streets, in the squares she raises her voice. On a busy corner she cries out, at the entrances of the gates in the city, she speaks her sayings: “How long, O simple ones, will you love simplicity? And how long will scoffers delight in their scoffing, and fools hate knowledge?”

The literary term for this technique is personification—casting an abstract idea, in this case wisdom, as a person or living thing. English sayings such as “Greed overtook him” or “Love blinded her” are personifications. In these cases, the speaker refers to the abstract concepts of “greed” and “love” as if they are living things.

The Old Testament Controversy

The prominent use of feminine pronouns to speak of Wisdom in Proverbs (“she raises her voice”; “she calls out”; “she speaks”) could lead people to believe that Wisdom was a goddess figure in Israel’s religion. It can be argued that Proverbs 8 emerged during a stage of Israelite history when the people believed that Yahweh, the God of Israel, had a wife or consort who assisted Him in creating the world.

This belief could be supported by other ancient Near Eastern religions having analogous beliefs: all the religions of the wider Mediterranean had goddesses. Worshipers paired some of these goddesses with gods, making them divine couples whose cohabitations led to various aspects of the natural world. In the religion of Ugarit, to cite the most relevant example, the chief god El had a wife named Athirat. (Worshipers in Ugaritic religion used El, the most common Semitic term for deity, as a proper name.) The same is true of the Old Testament—el is both a term for deity (e.g., Exod 15:11; Jer 51:56) and one of the names for the God of Israel (Gen 33:20; 46:3; Isa 14:13). Archaeologists have uncovered several inscriptions that contain prayers to “Yahweh and his asherah,” a possible reference to the famous goddess Asherah. However, no ancient Near Eastern religions specifically refer to Asherah as a wisdom goddess. Moreover, while she is associated with the tree of life, the biblical tree of life could just as easily be associated with Yahweh Himself rather than a presumed deity wife.

Evaluating the Presumed Evidence

The use of feminine pronouns for Wisdom in Proverbs is much more mundane than a veiled reference to an Old Testament goddess.

In English many words intuitively describe either males (“boy,” “man,” “priest,” “buck,” “bull”) or females (“girl,” “woman,” “priestess,” “doe,” “heifer”). But other English words are ambiguous, requiring some context to determine gender: “author,” “doctor,” “lawyer.” Since modern English does not grammatically assign gender to nouns, any gender reference for many English words is almost always entirely dependent on context. This isn’t the case for many languages around the world, though. Some use grammatical gender to resolve such ambiguity and provide a means of grammatical agreement with verbs and adjectives, which themselves also use gender classification. In some languages, grammatical gender is a means of relating words to each other. Hebrew is one of these languages.

Grammatical gender and biological gender have little to do with each other. The ancient biblical languages assign a gender to all nouns, not just the ones associated with physical gender. For example, the Hebrew word nephesh (often translated “soul”) is grammatically feminine despite there being nothing “physical” about the term. The Hebrew word for “wisdom” is likewise feminine. The writer of Proverbs thus uses feminine pronouns to refer to the noun “wisdom” in Proverbs 8 and elsewhere. Wisdom’s “femininity” refers to its grammatical classification, not to a female goddess. The Hebrew word for “law” (torah) is also grammatically feminine, but it is also not female in a physical sense.

In addition, while many Old Testament writers use familial imagery for Yahweh’s heavenly host or divine council members (e.g., “sons of God,” Job 38:7–8), the biblical writers never describe or endorse the idea that Yahweh and a consort conceived and birthed these other divine beings. This also eliminates the idea of a goddess ruling over Israel. Such imagery, though common in other ancient Near Eastern religions, is absent in the Old Testament.

More Viable Options

There are two possible alternatives to identifying Wisdom as a goddess: either Wisdom is a mere literary personification—meaning that no actual entity is or was intended to be behind the figure that assisted God as His agent in creation—or Wisdom is a deity figure equivalent to, but separate from, Yahweh. This latter option, which views Wisdom in terms of the Godhead, parallels New Testament descriptions of Jesus’ relationship to God the Father. Several writers in the New Testament even use Wisdom language to speak of Jesus (e.g., John 1; 1 Cor 1:30).

Michael S. Heiser

Further Reading

Jesus as Wisdom

Asherah CLBD

El DDD

Names of God DOT: P

Names of God in the OT AYBD

Names of God: El ISBE

Ashtoreth (Deity) AYBD

Asherah (Deity) AYBD

Astarte, Ashtoreth DDD

Asherah DDD