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Sophia in Wisdom Literature

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Sophia in Wisdom Literature

The book of Proverbs gives Wisdom her fullest voice in the Hebrew Bible: she calls out in the street and at the city gates, and in its eighth chapter she describes herself as present with God before the creation of the world, brought forth or possessed at the very beginning and rejoicing beside him as the world was made, language later readers across multiple traditions took as more than poetic personification.

The Wisdom of Solomon, a Greek language Jewish text of the last centuries BCE, develops her considerably further, calling her a breath of the power of God and a pure emanation of his glory, language that pushes toward treating Wisdom as something closer to a distinct divine reality than a literary figure of speech. Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, takes a different tack in its twenty fourth chapter, identifying Wisdom directly with the Torah itself, so that the law given to Israel becomes the concrete, textual form the cosmic figure calling out in Proverbs finally takes. Across these three texts Wisdom moves steadily from a literary personification, God's wisdom spoken of as though it were a person for rhetorical effect, toward something closer to an independent figure standing beside God, a trajectory later Christian and Gnostic writers each picked up and developed in their own, quite different directions.

Sources The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors) with An Introduction to the ApocryphaBruce M. Metzger

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