Who is Lady Wisdom?

The book of Proverbs was written to give “prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young”, and to make the wise even wiser. Later in chapter 1 we are introduced to a character named Wisdom. She is a lady so we will refer to her as Lady Wisdom. 

So who is Lady Wisdom? Lady Wisdom is a woman who has ideal qualities and she is greater than earthly treasures. Her fruit is better than gold, she walks in the way of the righteous and she grants inheritance to those who love her.  From the text we see that Lady Wisdom was also a workman along with the protagonist, “then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.” So Lady Wisdom was with the protagonist during creation. 

“For some ecotheologians, she morphs into some aspects of the Holy Spirit for Christians, the Shekinah for Jews, and doesn’t seem to get much play in Islam, due to their concepts of monotheism.  She is first Mother who is made manifest by Jesus of Nazareth who is her child, and also the Sender for whom he is the Prophet par excellence in the earliest Jesus-movement.”

Carole Fontaine, Taylor Professor of Biblical Theology and History, Andover Newton Theological School

Readers of the Old Testament are familiar with real women and real situations so for there to be a co-creator along with the protagonist there may be a shock for some readers. I am sure that this one quote has caused an abundance of questions and concerns, but it is not to be taken literally.

Of course she isn’t real, she is only a personification of the abstract quality of wisdom. The purpose of chapter eight is to praise wisdom. If there was a time when wisdom didn’t exist, then there was a time when the protagonist did not have wisdom. You can’t have the protagonist of the Old Testament not have wisdom. The entire Old Testament is basically about his wisdom, or the situations that the characters find themselves in when they either listen to his wisdom or not. So if the protagonist didn’t have wisdom he wouldn’t have been able to create wisdom in the first place. So the author, who we assume is Solomon, creates this fictional character that was an attribute of protagonist during the creation of the earth. We see in Proverbs 3:19 “the lord by wisdom founded the earth.”

Why is Lady Wisdom a woman? We see the pronoun “her”  and automatically assume that the character is a woman, but it may have to be intended that way. The Hebrew language along with Spanish and French uses grammatical gender whereas the English language does not. The Hebrew translation for “wisdom” is “chokmoth” and this is feminine so it’s only natural to consider Lady Wisdom a woman.