Wisdom in Proverbs 8:22
In Proverbs 8:22, We get to see that Wisdom (Title for Christ) is being spoken about being created or possessed, made, Brought forth, etc. The Hebrew word used in v22 is "Qanah" קָנָה which means to get, acquire, create, buy, or possess. However, A lot of Bible translations such as the KJV, ESV, ASV, YLT, and DRA render 'Qanah' as Possessed, which Trinitarians use to argue that this is related to the eternal Attribute of God. But this is clearly illogical, Possessed denotes a beginning always, so if we look at it from the Trinitarian Perspective, The Lord possessed his wisdom? As it's been seen before, nearly every time "possessed" is used in the King James Bible (For example), it means to take something for a possession, or obtaining it. Did God have to obtain his own wisdom? Not the attribute, but the person of his Son, who is the wisdom of God personified. Now in the context of this verse, we have v23-25 Did God bring forth and set up his own wisdom, or Christ the wisdom of God? Proverbs 8:22-25. It was for sure Christ and not in relation to the attribute of Wisdom because it would infer God was without wisdom and created it "as the beginning of his way" since God has always been wise it must be speaking about something external to God.
Right after Verse 22, We have verses 23 which has the Hebrew Term עוֹלָם(Olam), which can mean long duration, antiquity, or futurity. But Modern Bible translations render this as "Everlasting" which helps the Trinitarian Position because this would mean that Wisdom is eternal in that sense. However, that's not the case, based on the surrounding context we can determine correctly what it means. In Proverbs 8:22 case, we see that it's speaking about a long time, which is equivalent to Christ's Pre-existence. The appropriate/correct rendering of Olam should be Ancient due to the context which logically follows. The term can mean everlasting, but this would also be depending on what context it stands on. We can also see that it speaks about a time when the earth was not made, and that Christ was not absent during that time since the world came through the son because of the Father. (Proverbs 8:30; John 1:3,10)
Is Proverbs 8 not Literal but Poetic?
A lot of Trinitarians argue that this isn't wisdom being applied to Christ and that this is simply poetic or not literal. First of all, we should acknowledge Proverbs 8:7-9 KJV explicitly states that Christ "shall speak truth; and wickedness is an abomination to my lips. <8> All the words of my mouth are in righteousness; there is nothing froward or perverse in them.". We get the idea that this Chapter to say the most is Not in fact Metaphorical but literal and full of truth.The Son likewise acknowledges the Father, speaking in His own person, under the name of Wisdom: The Lord formed Me as the beginning of His ways, with a view to His own works; before all the hills did He beget Me. For if indeed Wisdom in this passage seems to say that She was created by the Lord with a view to His works, and to accomplish His ways, yet proof is given in another Scripture that all things were made by the Word, and without Him was there nothing made; John 1:3 as, again, in another place (it is said), By His word were the heavens established, and all the powers thereof by His Spirit — that is to say, by the Spirit (or Divine Nature) which was in the Word: thus is it evident that it is one and the same power which is in one place described under the name of Wisdom, and in another passage under the appellation of the Word, which was initiated for the works of God Proverbs 8:22 which strengthened the heavens; by which all things were made, John 1:3 and without which nothing was made. (Tertullian, Praxeus, 7)
Justin Martyr - (100-150 AD)
“But this Offspring, which was truly brought forth from the Father, was with the Father before all the creatures, and the Father communed with Him; even as the Scripture by Solomon has made clear, that He whom Solomon calls Wisdom, was begotten as a Beginning before all His creatures and as Offspring by God” - Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, chapter LXII (62)
I shall attempt to persuade you, since you have understood the Scriptures, [of the truth] of what I say, that there is, and that there is said to be, another God and Lord subject to the Maker of all things; who is also called an Angel, because He announces to men whatsoever the Maker of all things— above whom there is no other God — wishes to announce to them. (Dialogue with Trypho, 56)
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Justin goes on to explain that this “other God” is the angel who appeared to some of the characters in the Hebrew Bible as God (the creator)’s representative. And he Identifies that other god with “The Word”, or “Wisdom”:
I shall give you another testimony, my friends, from the Scriptures, that God begot before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos; and on another occasion He calls Himself Captain (Dialogue with Trypho, 61)
So, Justin Identifies Christ (The Logos) as Wisdom, the Word, another god, and an Angel, subject to the maker of all things. In chapter 61, Justin he explicitly identifies this individual with Wisdom of Proverbs 8. Justin Martyr thought of the Logos as a different god than the creator, and he thought of the Logos as subject to the creator God, and as the first born, and in fact, first made of creation (as it says in Proverbs 8).
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Tatian - (120 -180 AD)
For the Lord of the universe, who is Himself the necessary ground of all being, inasmuch as no creature was yet in existence, was alone…with Him, by Logos-power the Logos Himself also, who was in Him, subsists. And by His simple will the Logos springs forth; and the Logos, not coming forth in vain, becomes the first-begotten work of the Father. Him (the Logos) we know to be the beginning of the world. But He came into being by participation, not by abscission; for what is cut off is separated from the original substance. – Tatian, Address to the Greeks, chap 5
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God was in the beginning; but the beginning, we have been taught, is the power of the Logos. For the Lord of the universe, who is Himself the necessary ground (ὑπόστασις) of all being, inasmuch as no creature was yet in existence, was alone; but inasmuch as He was all power, Himself the necessary ground of things visible and invisible, with Him were all things; with Him, by Logos-power (διὰ λογικῆς δυνάμεως), the Logos Himself also, who was in Him, subsists. And by His simple will the Logos springs forth; and the Logos, not coming forth in vain, becomes the first-begotten work of the Father. Him (the Logos) we know to be the beginning of the world. But He came into being by participation, not by abscission; for what is cut off is separated from the original substance, but that which comes by participation, making its choice of function, does not render him deficient from whom it is taken. For just as from one torch many fires are lighted, but the light of the first torch is not lessened by the kindling of many torches, so the Logos, coming forth from the Logos-power of the Father, has not divested of the Logos-power Him who begot Him. I myself, for instance, talk, and you hear; yet, certainly, I who converse do not become destitute of speech (λόγος) by the transmission of speech, but by the utterance of my voice I endeavour to reduce to order the unarranged matter in your minds. And as the Logos, begotten in the beginning, begot in turn our world, having first created for Himself the necessary matter, so also I, in imitation of the Logos, being begotten again, and having become possessed of the truth, am trying to reduce to order the confused matter which is kindred with myself. For matter is not, like God, without beginning, nor, as having no beginning, is of equal power with God; it is begotten, and not produced by any other being, but brought into existence by the Framer of all things alone. (Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 5)
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*NOTE*; That Tatian here distinguishes from God being the necessary ground of all being, and the Logos being an aspect of him which comes forth into the world as a distinct entity as “the first-begotten work” in creation. The Logos, as a hypostasis, is the beginning of creation, prior to which it is not a hypostasis but merely an aspect of God. Tatian uses the illustration of a torch lighting another torch; so we have a high Christology, but still the Logos as distinct from the father has a beginning, he comes into being, he is “begotten in the beginning.” This Logos then “begets” the world, (in this sense it would be very easy to argue that Tatian thinks of the begetting of the Logos as being similar to the creation of the world), whereas it is only God who has no beginning whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteTatian describes the Logos as being begotten (γεννητός), but this does not imply that the Logos is a created being or that He had a temporal beginning. The phrase "springs forth" reflects the eternal generation of the Logos, a concept later clarified and codified by the Nicene Creed as "begotten, not made." He explicitly denies that the Logos is created in the same way as matter or the world. He states, "He came into being by participation, not by abscission." This metaphor distinguishes the Logos’s generation from any process that divides or diminishes the substance of God. The analogy of the torch lighting other torches reinforces this: the light of the first torch is not diminished by kindling others. This suggests that the Logos is eternally generated, sharing fully in the divine essence without diminishing the Father. His use of "participation" (κοινωνία) emphasizes that the Logos is an emanation of God’s power and essence, not a creature distinct in substance or origin. This is consistent with the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son in later Trinitarian theology. While he does not use the precise Nicene terminology, his thought aligns with the concept of eternal generation: the Logos derives from the Father’s essence but is not a separate or created entity.
DeleteThe phrase "first-begotten work" does not place the Logos within the created order but highlights His role as the agent through whom all creation comes into being. He states that the Logos is "the beginning of the world," meaning that He is the principle or agent through which the world was created. This is consistent with John 1:1-3: "In the beginning was the Word… All things were made through Him." The Logos is distinct from creation because He existed with the Father before creation began. He asserts that matter itself is created by the Logos, further distinguishing the Logos from the created order. He describes the Logos as existing "in Him" before coming forth. This parallels the theology of Justin, who explains that the Logos was eternally present within the Father and only "came forth" in the act of creation without any division or diminution of God’s essence (Trypho, 61). The Logos’s "begetting" is therefore an eternal relationship with the Father, not a temporal event or a moment of creation.
The analogy of the torch is crucial to understanding his theology of the Logos. This analogy suggests that the Logos proceeds from the Father as light from light, emphasizing the shared essence and indivisibility of the Father and the Logos. He explicitly states that the begetting of the Logos does not cause separation or division in God: "What is cut off is separated from the original substance, but that which comes by participation does not render Him deficient from whom it is taken." This anticipates later Nicene theology, where the Son is fully God, sharing the same divine essence with the Father, without division or diminution. Just as the light of one torch kindles another without diminishing the first, the Logos exists eternally in relation to the Father. This analogy demonstrates both the unity and distinction within God: the Logos is distinct as a hypostasis, but He is inseparable from the Father’s essence.
The interpretation that the Logos "comes into being" as a created entity misunderstands his terminology and philosophical framework. He uses language that anticipates the Nicene distinction between begotten and made. When he states that the Logos "came into being," he is not referring to creation ex nihilo but to the eternal generation of the Son from the Father. The Logos’s "coming forth" signifies His distinct personhood within the Godhead, not a moment of creation. The term "first-begotten work" refers to the Logos’s role as the principle and agent of creation, not His inclusion within creation. This aligns with Col. 1:15, where Christ is called the "firstborn of all creation," meaning preeminent over creation, not a part of it.
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DeleteColossians 1.16, Is The Translation "All Other Things" Appropriate? [Yes]
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DeletePART 1 - PROVERBS 8:22-31 LXX SEPTUAGINT VERSIONS
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ReplyDeleteYour entire case turns on two moves that cannot bear the theological freight you load onto them: first, a lexical absolutizing of קָנָה (qanāh) in Proverbs 8:22 and עוֹלָם (‘ōlām) in verse 23; second, a conflation of poetic personification with ontological biography that treats Wisdom’s first-person discourse as a literal, prosaic self-report of the Son’s temporal origin. Once those assumptions are examined against the Hebrew text, the literary form of Proverbs, the range of the key lexemes, the New Testament’s own wisdom-christology, and the pre-Nicene writers you cite in their historical setting, the Arian conclusion does not follow.
ReplyDeleteQanāh in Proverbs 8:22 does not “clearly” mean “created,” nor does “possessed” “always denote a beginning.” The verb’s core sense is “acquire, get,” and by extension “own/possess,” with a minority of contexts where “create” is a plausible gloss precisely because acquisition and origination can overlap conceptually. Genesis 4:1 uses qanāh in Eve’s exclamation “I have gotten a man,” where bearing and acquiring mingle; Genesis 14:19 twice calls God ‘ēl ‘elyōn, qōnēh šāmayim wā’āreṣ, the “possessor of heaven and earth”—a title that patently does not imply that God once lacked ownership and later “obtained” the cosmos, much less that the title marks a temporal beginning in God. In Deuteronomy 32:6 qanāh can shade toward “made” because the verse is about God’s act toward Israel; but that semantic possibility is not a lexical law. In Proverbs 8:22 the parallel line “as the beginning (rē’šît) of his way” already marks a wisdom-cosmology register rather than a craftsman’s report of fabrication, and it is precisely here that the ancient translators diverge: the Septuagint renders ἔκτισέν με (“created me”), but Aquila and Symmachus—hyperliteral readers of the Hebrew—use ἐκτήσατο (“acquired/possessed”), reflecting the primary Hebrew sense. That split in the oldest witnesses is itself a warning against your claim that “possessed denotes a beginning always.” It does not. “Possess” can be stative, describing what is and always has been God’s. Your argument that “possess” must mean “take something for a possession” in every KJV occurrence simply mistakes English idiom for Hebrew semantics and ignores places where possession is predicated of God without any notion of a new acquisition.
The appeal to ‘ōlām in verse 23 fares no better. The word ranges from “remote time/antiquity” to “everlasting/eternity,” and the context controls which nuance is in view. “From ‘ōlām I was set up; from the beginning, before the earth” pairs the temporal marker with a string of pre-cosmic before-clauses. That rhetorical sequence is not marshaled to prove that Wisdom is a creature within time; its point is to place Wisdom on the God-side of the Creator–creation distinction, prior to “depths,” “springs,” “mountains,” and “hills.” Whether one translates ‘ōlām here as “from ancient times” or “from everlasting,” the discourse thrust is the same: the speaker stands outside the made order. Your suggestion that “modern translations choose ‘everlasting’ to help the Trinitarian position” does not account for the fact that historically diverse versions long before modern Trinitarian polemics already rendered “from everlasting,” and that many contemporary translations that prefer “long ago” or “ages ago” are not thereby endorsing creaturehood. The line signals pre-cosmic priority; it does not define a first moment of existence for a creature.
Nor does the poetic voice of Proverbs 8 suddenly cease to be poetic simply because Wisdom says, “I speak truth.” Personification is a literary device, not an exercise in deceit. Lady Wisdom addresses the simple from the city gates in chapter 1; she builds a house with seven pillars in chapter 9; she sends out maidens to summon guests. No responsible reader takes these as literal biographies of an hypostasis who contracts stonemasons and hires catering staff. The presence of truth-claims inside a personification does not transmute the trope into a prose chronicle. Proverbs 8 lives in the same literary world: Wisdom’s “I” is the voice of God’s wise order, not a diary entry of a creature giving her CV.
DeleteThe much-debated word ’āmōn in 8:30 actually exposes how slippery your “master worker” proof is. The term is lexically ambiguous; it can mean “craftsman” in later Hebrew, but in this context many philologists and translators render “nursling/child,” which fits the parallel lines “I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always.” The Septuagint’s ἁρμόζουσα (“arranging/harmonizing”) paraphrases the sense without deciding the philology. Either way, the poetry is pointing to Wisdom’s intimate presence with God and her role in the harmonic ordering of creation, not to an ontological declaration that a second, subordinate being was fabricated prior to the world.
When you turn from the Hebrew poem to the New Testament, you cite 1 Corinthians 1:24, Matthew 11:19, Luke 11:49 and Matthew 23:34, and Hebrews 1:2 as though these texts equate Christ with a created Wisdom and therefore clinch the point. In 1 Corinthians 1 Paul is not writing a metaphysical treatise; he is expounding the paradox that the crucified Messiah embodies God’s saving wisdom and power over against the world’s expectations. “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” functions soteriologically: the proclamation of the cross is God’s wisdom, and to those who are called the crucified one is the living enactment of that wisdom and power. The genitive “of God” there is a genitive of source and characterization, not a definition of Jesus as a separable divine attribute that once came into being. The Synoptic pair you invoke is likewise tenuous as support for creaturehood. Luke 11:49’s “the Wisdom of God said” may be Luke’s ascription to a sapiential script or to divine wisdom personified; Matthew 23:34’s “I send you prophets” places the same words on Jesus’ lips without implying a creaturely identity. If anything, the Synoptic intertext raises the christological question whether Jesus speaks as the embodiment of God’s own Wisdom, which sits comfortably with a high christology and has no probative value for the claim that he is a made intermediary. Hebrews 1:1–2, which you cite for “through whom [God] made the ages,” pushes in the opposite direction: the Son is God’s definitive speech, the effulgence of his glory and the exact imprint of his nature, through whom the ages were made and who upholds all things by the word of his power. That is agency on the Creator side, not the biography of a creature elevated to be God’s tool.
Revelation 3:14’s ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς κτίσεως τοῦ θεοῦ is a favorite prop, and you set it beside Proverbs 8:22 to infer a created beginning for the Son. But ἀρχή in Johannine literature bears conceptual weight beyond mere temporal firstness. John’s Prologue revels in “the beginning” as the fontal source of all that is; elsewhere ἀρχή can denote “origin” or “ruler/principality” depending on context. In Revelation 3:14 the most natural sense in the Apocalypse’s christology is “origin/source” of God’s creation, the one from whom creation takes its rise, which coheres with the letter’s consistent ascription to the Lamb of divine titles and prerogatives. To insist that ἀρχή must mean “first creature” here ignores the Johannine idiom and forces a reading that collides with the New Testament’s broader creator-Christ pattern.
Even if one grants, for argument’s sake, that the Septuagint’s ἔκτισέν με in Proverbs 8:22 captures a sense of origination, the history of exegesis shows how the catholic tradition handled that line: it was read of the Son’s role ad extra or of the economy of salvation, not of his eternal being ad intra. Athanasius famously parsed the clause as referring to the incarnate dispensation or to Wisdom’s being “set up” in relation to works, while guarding the doctrine of eternal generation by distinguishing γεννάω from ποιέω. That distinction is not a post-biblical imposition but a conceptual clarification already latent in the Scriptures’ two-register way of speaking about God’s act and God’s Wisdom. Colossians 1, Hebrews 1, and John 1 do not merely call Christ an instrument; they ascribe to him what Second Temple Jews guarded as divine prerogatives: founding, sustaining, and receiving worship from the heavenly court. If Proverbs 8 provided Israel’s poetic idiom for God’s wise ordering, the New Testament dares to say that the same Wisdom is now personally present in the Son without thereby moving him into the creaturely set.
DeleteFinally, the theological reductio embedded in your argument should give you pause. You rightly recoil from the thought that God “obtained” wisdom he did not previously have, and you reason that therefore Proverbs 8 must be about a separate person who was “acquired/created.” But that is a false dilemma. The alternative to “God once lacked wisdom” is not “therefore God made a wise assistant.” The alternative is what the canon actually gives us: a poem that dramatizes God’s own wise ordering of the world in the figure of Wisdom, which the apostles then press into service to proclaim that the One who is “with God” and “is God” is the very Wisdom and Word by whom all things came to be. Read that way, Proverbs 8:22–31 is not an Arian manifesto but a sapiential prelude to Johannine, Pauline, and Hebraic high christology.
The New Testament’s affinity between Christ and Wisdom therefore yields, at most, a typological identification: the same Wisdom by whom and in whom God ordered the world has been made flesh, and the texts draw on the sapiential script to interpret Jesus’ person and work. That framework does not license the leap from personification to creaturehood. Early Christian writers who exploited Proverbs 8 in their christology are not on your side in the way you suggest. Yes, Justin, Tertullian, and Tatian speak with pre-Nicene freedom and sometimes in subordinationist tones. But read them fairly. Justin repeatedly says the Son existed “before all creatures” and that “all things were made through him,” which is not a confession of creaturehood. Tertullian’s Against Hermogenes is engaged with a different foe—eternal matter—and his argument that only the Father is “unbegotten and uncreated” sits alongside his insistence that the Son is from the Father’s own substance, that the Word was in God and went forth for creation, and that the same one is the Wisdom and the Word by whom all things were made. His language about “created” in Proverbs 8 belongs to the Latin rhetorical register where “created/formed/constituted” can describe the Son’s “going forth” for the work of creation without implying he is a product ex nihilo on the creature side; the same treatise and his Adversus Praxean make clear he opposed modalism by affirming real distinction while locating the Son within the divine reality. Tatian, for his part, drifted into Encratite rigorism and offers no catholic norm; his torch metaphor, whatever its suggestiveness, is precisely the kind of analogical speculation that later orthodoxy refined by speaking of eternal generation rather than temporal origination. To treat such exploratory pre-Nicene vocabulary as if it were a univocal endorsement of Arian ontology is anachronism.
DeleteYour attempt to restrict Proverbs 8 to a literal “person separate from God” because Wisdom speaks with “I” language simply begs the literary question. Biblical Hebrew freely personifies qualities in the first person; Lady Wisdom and Lady Folly are set in deliberate juxtaposition in Proverbs 9, each with a “house,” “table,” and “call,” and no one imagines Folly is an ontological hypostasis with creaturely subsistence. The “I” voice is a pedagogical stratagem in wisdom literature, not a metaphysical claim. That is why the church’s hermeneutic has long been typological rather than literalistic here: the poem gives the church a script for naming Christ as the embodiment of God’s wisdom without turning the poem into a proof-text that he is a made being.