When he made firm the sky above,
when he strengthened the fountains of the flood,
When he appointed to the sea his bound,
that the waters should not transgress his command,
when he fixed the foundations of the earth,
Then was I beside him as architect,
and was daily full of delight,
sporting[1] before him at all times,
I who (still) have sport with his fruitful earth,
and have my delight with the sons of men.
The bold originality of this passage requires no proof. It cuts away at a blow the old mythical conception of the world as the work of God's hands, and of an arbitrary omnipotence. 'God,' as Hooker says, 'is a law both to himself and to all things beside;' 'his wisdom hath stinted the effects of his power.' 'Nor is the freedom of the will of God any whit abated, let, or hindered, by means of this; because the imposition of this law upon himself is his own free and voluntary act' ('Jehovah produced me'). The idea, then, of the world as a Cosmos was not adopted by the Jews from the Greeks; it arose of itself as soon as religious men pondered over the phenomena of nature. The author of Job took up the idea, and reexpressed it worthily in xxviii. 12-28, the chief difference between him and his predecessor being that he denies the attainableness for man of wisdom in the larger sense, while the author of the 'Praise of Wisdom' does not raise the question whether the higher department of wisdom is open to human enquiry.
At the subsequent history of the conception of Wisdom we can barely glance.[2] The cosmogonist in Gen. i., a sublime*
- ↑ Comp. Delitzsch, System der christlichen Apologetik, § 16, where the history
of this conception in Jewish literature is traced in connection with that of the
Logos-idea; also Ewald, Die Lehre der Bibel von Gott, iii. 74-77. - ↑ In Wisd. vii. 22 &c. the language appears to some to rise above poetical personification, and to imply a conscious hypostatising of Wisdom. Dante, a good judge on this point, certainly thought otherwise (Convito, iii. 15); he evidently holds that the Sophia of the Book of Wisdom is precisely analogous to his own very strong personification of divine Philosophy. Still such language may have partly prepared the way for the well-known Gnostic myth of Achamoth or Sophia (comp. Baur, Three First Centuries, E. T., i. 207). It was well, as Plumptre remarks, that Philo adopted Logos rather than Sophia as the name of
