Proverbs 8:22–31
The Bible4Jesus.com Podcast
About this episode
When we come to a passage like this, we are treading on holy ground. The book of Proverbs is intensely practical, filled with street-level wisdom for young men on how to avoid harlots, stay out of debt, and keep from being a sluggard. But then we come to chapter 8, and the sky opens up. A figure named Wisdom speaks, and what she says about herself is staggering. Our modern, flattened-out evangelicalism doesn't quite know what to do with this. The first is to say this is simply a literary device, a personification of an abstract attribute of God. This is true, as far as it goes, but it is thin gruel. It doesn't do justice to the sheer weight and personality of the one speaking here. It treats the text like a clever poem and nothing more.