“When he established the heavens, I was there … when he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was beside [the Lord], like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always”.
So Wisdom is described, in these verses in the second portion of Proverbs 8 which the lectionary offers us for this Sunday, the first Sunday after the festival of Pentecost (Prov 8:22–31). Of course, this day is identified in the liturgical calendar as Trinity Sunday, and this passage from Proverbs is one of a number of Scripture passages which, over three years, are proposed for this particular Sunday.
The others are Genesis 1, where God, God’s word, and God’s spirit are to be found, and Isaiah 6, which includes the tripartite song “holy, holy, holy”; and Psalms 8, a song in praise of creation, and 29, singing of “the voice of the Lord”. None of them, of course, make any specific claim that can be seen to be articulating a “doctrine of the Trinity”. It is up to later Christian interpreters to “read back” into the passage any inferences regarding a triune God.
In this post I am not going to attempt any exegetical gymnastics, to find aspects of the threefold nature of God in what is said about Wisdom. In an earlier post, I have explored the importance of what is said about where Wisdom exercises her ministry (8:1–4). In this post, I turn to the the significance of the role that Wisdom plays in the creation of the world (8:22–31). These are themes that are inherent in the passage itself; as we attend to these matters, we don’t need to squeeze, distort, or manipulate the text to make it conform with a much later dogmatic theory.
Perhaps there is a connection with the patristic Christian doctrine of the Trinity; we can see this if we trace a trajectory from the Jewish documents already noted, in the scriptural text of Proverbs, then following its development through the Intertestamental texts of the Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sirach. These lead to some of the New Testament texts we have noted, where Jesus is described in terms drawn from these earlier scriptural passages (Col 1, Heb 1, and John 1).
In Proverbs 8, Wisdom herself is said to have declared that “ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth … when [the Lord] established the heavens, I was there … when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master worker” (Prov 8:22–31). In the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is described as “the fashioner of all things” (Wisd Sol 7:22), “a breath of the power of God” who “pervades and penetrates all things”(7:24–25), who was “present when you [God] made the world” (9:9), whose “immortal spirit is in all things” (12:1). Som wisdom pre-exists all other elements of creation, and Wisdom herself participates with the deity in the creating of the world.
The importance of these Wisdom writings for what is stated about Jesus in Col 1:15–20, Heb 1:1–4, and John 1:1–18, cannot be overstated. In these New Testament passages, Jesus is identified as the one who has “first place in everything” (Col 1:18), the Word who was “in the beginning … with God” (John 1:1), the one who “sustains all things by his powerful word” (Heb 1:3). In this last book, this word is further described, in language drawn from the Wisdom traditions, as “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb 1:3).
In Prov 8, Wisdom herself declares that “before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth—when [the Lord] had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil” (Prov 8:25–26), just as the works of Wisdom can be traced “from the beginning of creation” (Wisdom Sol 6:22). Wisdom is described in Proverbs as being “set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth” (Prov 8:30), taking part with the deity in the acts of creation. All that came into being was due to the creative contribution of Wisdom from the very start.
The poetry of this hymn builds through repetition and an ever-expanding circle of influence. So Wisdom declares that “when he established the heavens, I was there … when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit … when he marked out the foundations of the earth” (Prov 8:27–29). In all these acts of creation, Wisdom was beside the Lord, “daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race” (Prov 8:30–31).
This affirmation in Proverbs leads on to the subsequent claim that Wisdom “pervades and penetrates all things” (Wisd Sol 7:24) and “renews all things … [she] passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God, and prophets” (Wisd Sol 7:27). She “reaches mightily from one end of the earth to the other, and she orders all things well” (Wisd Sol 8:1).
Likewise, Jesus son of Sirach writes in a song of Wisdom that she “came forth from the mouth of the Most High, and covered the earth like a mist” (Sir 24:3), expanding on this in a sequence of grand claims: “I dwelt in the highest heavens, and my throne was in a pillar of cloud. Alone I compassed the vault of heaven and traversed the depths of the abyss. Over waves of the sea, over all the earth, and over every people and nation I have held sway.” (Sir 24:6).
The all-encompassing work of Wisdom in this act of creation is emphasised through the places noted—the depths, the heavens, the sea, and the land. Her hymn of celebration reflects the joyous song sung by the psalmist in Psalm 95.
The depths of the earth were the place where sinful people went (Ps 63:9; Isa 14:15), following the lead of the Egyptians who pursued the Israelites and “went down into the depths like a stone” (Exod 15:4–5; Neh 9:11; Isa 63:11–13). There, in the depths, God’s anger burned (Deut 32:22). However, those banished to the depths were able to be brought back from the depths by God’s decree (Ps 68:22; 71:20; 86:13), so in one psalm we hear the cry, “out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; Lord, hear my voice” (Ps 130:1), and the prophet Micah affirms that God “will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea” (Mic 7:19).
The heights are where the Lord God set the people once they had made their home in Israel, “atop the heights of the land … [where] he fed [them] with the produce of the land” (Deut 32:13; similarly, Isa 49:9; 58:14; Ezek 34:14). It is a place of security (2 Sam 22:34; Ps 18:33); indeed, “on the heights” is where Wisdom is to be found (Prov 8:2) and the Temple was built on the (relative) heights of Mount Zion, and so it is from “the holy height” that God looks down over the people (Ps 102:19).
Just as the depths and the heights were parts of God’s good creation, so too the sea was integral to God’s creative works: “yonder is the sea, great and wide, creeping things innumerable are there, living things both small and great” (Ps 104:25). Yet the sea was a threatening place for the people of Israel, accustomed to life on the land, planting grapevines and herding sheep in “the land of milk and honey”. The sea of reeds was the place of destruction for Egypt (Ps 114:1–8), although it was also the location of salvation for Israel, as is celebrated in David’s song of praise (2 Sam 22:1–4, repeated at Ps 18:6, 12–19).
For sailors, however, the sea could be a place of great danger (Ps 107:23–31)—the story of Jonah attests to this (Jon 1:4–17), as does the final trip of Paul as he is taken as a prisoner to Rome (Acts 27:14–20). Yet the power of the roaring sea, as majestic as it is, pales into insignificance beside the majesty of the Lord on high (Ps 93:3–4).
Just as the sea was a place of danger, so the dry land was a place of safety—as evidenced by the way the story of crossing the sea of reeds is told (Exod 14:21; Neh 9:11; Ps 66:6) and when Jonah is vomited up onto dry land by the fish (Jon 2:10). However, when the Psalmist finds themselves in “a dry and weary land where there is no water”, a prayer is offered to God because “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you” (Ps 63:1). When linked with “the wilderness”, “the dry land” receives blessing from God, who will “make the wilderness a pool of water, and the dry land springs of water” (Isa 41:18) and “pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Isa 44:3).
So Wisdom has shared with the Lord God in the whole enterprise of bringing into being the whole creation. Her importance in this task cannot be minimised. And the wonders of the whole creation are in view in this passage from Proverbs, as Wisdom celebrates: “I was beside [the Lord], like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”
See also
An Informed Faith 