Week 28 Proverbs 8
The second half of the chapter gets around to asking the question: how old is Wisdom? The short answer: Wisdom has always been around.
Wisdom was:
• at the beginning of (the Lord’s) creation
• before (the Lord’s) works of long ago
• before ancient times, from the beginning, before the earth began
• when there were no watery depths.
There could be a debate about whether wisdom has existed forever or if it was created by the Lord way back when. But that’s a technical point. My bigger concern here is that wisdom – as far as it matters to me in practical terms – has been around forever. It’s a permanent fixture. People didn’t think-it-up. It didn’t evolve over eons. Wasn’t doped-out over time. It pre-existed everyone-everything. Greeks. Babylonians. Hebrews. The bible. Adam & Eve. Wisdom isn’t a human invention. It’s a square one perennial. Always there. Never absent in the history of everything.
I was a skilled craftsman beside him (the Lord). I was his delight every day, always rejoicing before him. I was rejoicing in his inhabited world, delighting in the children of Adam.
So it looks like Solomon isn’t sitting around thinking up proverbially wise sayings. It’s more like he’s tapped into this deep and universally accessible well of Wisdom and then he siphoned off thimblefuls of prepackaged digestible understandable wisdom to benefit his readers. Uncomplicated sayings from the Deep Well.
Note: quotes about wisdom are from Proverbs 8:22-24 and 8:30-31 (CSB)