The Moody Handbook of Messianic Prophecy: Studies and Expositions of the Messiah in the Old Testament by Michael Rydelnik and Edwin Blum

Author:Michael Rydelnik and Edwin Blum [Rydelnik, Michael; Blum; Edwin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2019-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Proverbs 8

The Messiah: Personification of Divine Wisdom

SETH D. POSTELL

Proverbs 8:22-31 has long been regarded as an important passage for the Christology of the Church. For many throughout Church history, this passage referred to the preincarnate Son of God, Divine Wisdom, who is the Father’s eternal delight and through whom all things were created. In modern times, however, the majority of Christian commentators have rejected the Christological interpretation. Bruce Waltke, in his recent commentary on Proverbs, states emphatically, “The notion that Wisdom is eternally being begotten is based on Christian dogma, not exegesis…. Augustine, Calvin, et al. erred in that they wrongly interpreted Wisdom as a hypostasis of God that they equated with Jesus Christ and not as a personification of the sage’s wisdom.”1

The thesis of this article is that Prv 8:22-31 does in fact refer to God’s eternal Son, through whom the universe was created. The goal of this exposition is to invite God’s people to emulate the Father by joining Him in the delight of His Son. The first section of this article will examine how Prv 8 was interpreted in early Jewish and Christian sources. The second section will look at the place of Proverbs within the Hebrew canon and also set the context of chap. 8 within the book itself. There it will be argued that the messianic interpretation is substantiated by the innertextual testimony of Prv 30:4-6. The third section will offer an exposition of the passage.

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