Another Puzzling Figure in the Hebrew Bible: Woman Wisdom?

[00:00:01] Another puzzling figure in the Hebrew Bible Woman Wisdom by Bart Ehrman. [00:00:08] Here is another tidbit from the Hebrew Bible section of the first edition of my textbook that covered Genesis to Revelation book by book, now being edited for a third edition with Joel Baden Woman Wisdom as God's Consort we have seen that in ancient Israel Yahweh was sometimes thought to have a divine consortium, his Asherah. Note if you're interested in this topic, we've just published one lecture course on it by Dan McLellan called the Israelite Goddess Asherah. [00:00:37] Now this was never accepted by the strict Henotheists who wrote the historical and prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible. [00:00:43] But in Proverbs, a book of Wisdom, there is a passage that some interpreters have thought represents a kind of modified or tamed view of Yahweh and his divine female companion from eternity past. [00:00:55] Here she is not Asherah, but Wisdom herself, shown to be speaking in Proverbs 8 the Lord created me at the beginning, or as the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago, ages ago. I was set up at the first, before the beginning of the earth, when he established the heavens, I was there when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, then I was beside him like a master worker, and I was daily his delights, rejoicing before him, always rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the human race. [00:01:33] Later Christians would take the feminine companion of God at creation. Wisdom. That's the Greek Sophia, a feminine noun and sometimes regarded as a feminine deity, and they transform her into the masculine word, that's the Greek Logos, a masculine noun, and claim that this one in the beginning, who was with God and was the one through whom God created all things, was in fact Christ before he became an incarnate human. [00:01:58] So for that see John 1:1:4. [00:02:02] The difficulty for both Jews and Christians involved understanding how this other being, Sophia Ologos, could be divine if in fact there is only one God. [00:02:13] For the Christians, it is this puzzle that eventually led to the development of the Trinity that even though God is manifest in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not one person but three, there is still only one God, not three. [00:02:28] This doctrine would not begin to be formulated clearly, however, until at least a century after the writing of the New Testament.