Proverbs8chapter 8

Wisdom takes the exact positions a public crier or a market trader would take: the top of the high places by the way, the meeting of the paths, the gates at the entry of the city. Those were the choke points where every traveller had to pass and where announcements were made. She is not hidden in a school; she is competing for attention with the grain sellers.

The chapter then claims the language of government — counsel, sound wisdom, understanding, strength — and says "by me kings reign, and princes decree justice." In the ancient Near East the king's chief boast was that he ruled by divine wisdom; Hammurabi's law stele opens exactly that way. Here the claim is put in Wisdom's own mouth and traced back to God.

The creation section is built out of the world as an Israelite saw it: the deep, the fountains under the ground, the mountains settled, the sea given a boundary it does not cross, the dust of the earth. What Wisdom claims is that she was there before all of it — "or ever the earth was."

One line has been argued over for centuries. The Hebrew verb in "the LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way" can be read as possessed, acquired, or brought forth, and the Greek translation's "created" was used in the fourth-century debates over whether Christ was a creature. The traditional reading holds that this is Wisdom personified — the poem's own device, established two chapters earlier — and that the verse is not a statement about the origin of the Son.