This is pulled from my own Facebook post obviously.

In another Facebook post I laughed at myself for not knowing that idioma in Spanish is masculine, not feminine. Language gender (and other grammar rules) is really important for understanding the Bible in general, but it is most important in Proverbs.

Wisdom is supposedly feminine in Proverbs, but we miss Wisdom’s connection to Jesus, especially in Proverbs 8:22-31, because our English translations (almost correctly) refer to Wisdom as “she.” The problem, though, is that Wisdom is not a woman, “she” is a feminine word, like “cup” in German and Spanish.

In both German and Spanish, coffee is a masculine word and cup is a feminine word. If we translated those two languages the way we translate Proverbs, we would say, “I poured him into her.” We don’t do that because English does not have word genders. We just have people genders.

We should probably translate “Wisdom” in Proverbs as “it,” not “she.” Using a feminine pronoun in Hebrew, Greek, German, or Spanish does not mean, nor even indicate, that if Wisdom speaks, “she” is speaking. The “she” in Hebrew usually means “it” in English unless it’s speaking of a person or animal.

Note: I do examine a lot of my claims more deeply before moving a post from Facebook to my blog. ChatGPT, a language AI, pointed out to me that the writer of Proverbs is personifying Wisdom, so using him or her could be appropriated. That’s important, but … “she” is no more appropriated than “he” because the fact that Sophia (Hebrew for “wisdom”) is a feminine word has nothing to do with human gender. 

In fact, German uses “it,” a neuter pronoun, for young women, not because Germans don’t know that young women are actually women, but because both maid and miss, Mädchen and Fräulein, have word endings, -lein and -chen, that require a neuter pronoun. I’m just now remembering, too, that a child is “das Kind,” neuter, whether the child is a boy or girl.

If you don’t know these things, and if no one tells you, then you are never going to know that Wisdom is not a woman, but was understood by Greek-speaking Christians to refer to either the Holy Spirit or Jesus, and always Jesus in Proverbs 8:22-31.

This is critical to early Trinitarian theology. Because everyone agreed that Proverbs 8:22 used “created” in reference to Jesus, Lucian of Antioch was able to deceive Arius of Egypt and Eusebius of Nicomedia into spreading the idea that the Son of God was created like everything and everyone else.

True teachers in the early centuries of the church understood that there was no way for a human to really understand how God could beget a Son, so the particular word used to describe God birthing a Son was not important. They used “emit” because Psalm 45:1 said, “My heart has emitted a good Word” (from Septuagint, what is Septuagint). God’s heart emitted him because he was not created like we were, from nothing, but he came out from the inside of God. Thus, he was the same “substance,” the same “essence,” the same eternal “stuff” that God is made of. We are made of created matter; the Son of God was “made” of “God” or at least of whatever “stuff” God is made of.

This was important because God is eternal and uncreated. Whatever he is made of has always existed, and therefore always will exist. Matter, or the “stuff” that earth, cherubim, seraphim, and humans are created from is not eternal. It had a beginning, so it can have an end. If the Son of God is from the substance of God, uncreated and eternal, then he is uncreated and eternal. If he is created from matter, then he is created and mortal.
These are insufficient words that the early Christians had to wrestle with to explain the unexplainable: God birthed a Son. Here’s one attempt to explain from the late second century:

We acknowledge … a Son of God. Don’t let anyone think it ridiculous that God should have a Son. … The Son of God is the Word of the Father … He is the first product of the Father, not as though he was being brought into existence, for from the beginning God, who is the eternal Mind, had the Logos in himself. … What then? Because the multitude, who cannot distinguish between matter and God, or see how great is the interval which lies between them, pray to idols made of matter, are we therefore, who do distinguish and separate the uncreated and the created … (Athenagoras, “A Plea for the Christians” 10 & 15; cited from my own Trinity Quote list)

Since Lucian, Eusebius (of Nicomedia, not the historian), and Arius, we’ve stopped using Proverbs 8:22-31 as referencing Jesus. The word “created” or “made” is not the problem, though. The issue is what Jesus was “created” from. He was eternally part of God, then God was able to generate/create/beget/emit his Word as a second to himself before the beginning of all things, and he is thus God and not creature.

This is referenced throughout the 250 years between the apostles and Arius the heretic, though Eusebius of Nicomedia (not Eusebius the historian, his contemporary) should be more to blame for the heresy and the consequent 60 years of unrest (and violence and killing) in the churches of the eastern Roman Empire.

I have a lot of quotes from those 250 years at the link I gave above, and even more in my book, Decoding Nicea (which  has 164 reviews on Amazon now!).

I didn’t mean to write all this when I started. Proverbs 8:22-31 seems to me the most important reason we should understand grammar gender versus human and animal gender.