This is the third in a series about pages 26-27 of Daughter Zion. In my last post I said that the personification of Wisdom makes an important metaphysical claim. Let me explain what I meant by that.
The fundamental divide between Israel and other cultures was the belief that one God created all things, so that the order of the world around us is due to the mind of a single artisan. While gentile theologies may have had a dominant god whose victory determines the basic structure of things, the world is inevitably a result of conflict between the gods. At best, Marduk slays his enemy the sea and uses her carcass to fashion the world; he does not make the sea. The gods are within the world and interact with it as a given. The wise man could learn from experience and tradition how to conduct himself in the world, and part of his wisdom was that one must take the gods into account as agents of justice, but his business of understanding the world was something apart from understanding the gods themselves. In fact, the gentile sage repeatedly warns that one must not try to understand the counsels of the gods, because their ways are simply a separate affair from ours.
By contrast, the Israelite saw the world as entirely from Yahweh. Yahweh does not stand within the world as an agent, but outside of the world as its maker. The order found in the world is from the order conceived in Yahweh’s mind. As a result, my understanding of the world is not something other than my pursuit of God, but is itself a partial grasp of the wisdom of Yahweh. Yahweh’s wisdom, the world’s order, and my grasp of the world’s order are all different levels or shares of the same form.
This is what makes the personification of Wisdom possible. Lady Wisdom has bewilderingly different roles in Proverbs: she belongs to God before anything else is created (3:19, 8:22-31); she is everywhere, speaking to men even during their most everyday activities (1:20-21); she comes into the heart of men (2:10 and many others). If we say that Wisdom represents an order found in the world, how is Wisdom something found in men, and in God? If we say that Wisdom is knowledge, how is she found out and about in the world? If she is something of God, how does she speak to men in the gates of the city? The answer is that the order found in the world and man’s partial grasp of that order are both partial forms of God’s understanding. By personifying Wisdom as an individual responsible for all these roles, the Israelite sage asserted, in a pictorial way, the unity of Wisdom. Likewise, by the fact that Wisdom comes from God, abides in the world, and from there enters the heart of man, the sage intimates that Wisdom is found most perfectly in God, less perfectly in the world, and least perfectly in the mind of man. In the terms of St. Thomas, Lady Wisdom is the assertion of a participatory structure both of creation and of knowledge.
All of this can be found in the first nine chapters of Proverbs, which form an extended introduction to the book. But it is crucial for the claim made there that Proverbs go on to repeat, much of the time, the wisdom common to mankind at the time. The claim is not that Israel’s wisdom is something apart from that of the nations, because that would imply that Israel’s cosmos was something apart. Rather, the claim is that all wisdom, even that of the Babylonians and the Egyptians, is a partial share in Israel’s God. The other nations may have wisdom, but they do not understand what they have. By restating the old maxims in a new context, Proverbs reclaims this Wisdom for her source.
