A typology of personified wisdom hymns

The poem on Wisdom in Job 28 presents one traditional understanding of divine Wisdom. The passages resonate to the imagery found elsewhere in the Book of Job. Divine Wisdom manifest in creation is referred to in several places (Job 26:5-14; 36:24-33; 37:1-24). And the creation motif is subtly illustrated in Job 28:25-26: "When he gave to the wind its weight, and appropriated out the waters by measure; when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt." Verses 25-26 are subordinate to v 27: "Then he saw it and declared it." Thus, this creation motif is unmistakably associated with Wisdom (Newson: 532).

The personification of Wisdom is still abortive: "Indeed, wisdom might be interpreted as a divine attribute" (Murphy 1996: 134). Characteristic of Job 28 is that the question concerning Wisdom is expressed in the refrain: "Where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?""(vv 12, 20). This quest for locale is an effort to find the original cosmic place or home of wisdom, a crucial task because the locale of Wisdom is related to its true nature and origin. Job 28:23 answers, "God knows the way to it; it is he who is familiar with its place." The poem on Wisdom in Job 28 assumes the essentially mysterious and hidden nature of Wisdom, which is somehow immanent in creation but totally transcendent and beyond human comprehension; it is "somehow present and visible [only] to God" (Murphy, 1996: 134). Unless it is revealed, Wisdom is totally invisible--basically inaccessible--to humans (Murphy 1996: 134-35; 1995: 222-24; Blenkinsopp 1983: 153-57; MacKenzie & Murphy: 466-88). In relation to God's creative activity, v 27 presents as "the locale" of Wisdom that God "saw it," "declared it," "established it" and "searched it out." These four verbs, in spite of their profound difficulty for translation, try to enunciate God's special relationship to Wisdom. Namely, the complete and thorough knowledge of Wisdom is exclusively God's possession: "she is the divine secret in the created world" (Murphy, 1996: 135). It is only God that knows the place of Wisdom and carries out the work of creation.

Simultaneously, this articulation underscores God's "Wholly Otherness." Using the metaphor of mining precious metals, the author of the poem illustrates the difficulty, the danger, and (ultimately) the impossibility of attaining Wisdom through human efforts. Although its value is comparable to those precious metals, it is unidentifiable or unreachable for humans. Job's emphatic contention that the Wisdom of God is essentially incomprehensible to humans is, in one sense, thorough resistance against the domestication of transcendence--the effort to contain God in neat retributional schemes. When the Wisdom of God is made universally available and thus "comprehensible" to anybody, it inevitably results in the danger of subsuming God into the human discursive world, taming God's transcendence, when the retribution theory is applied to this comprehensible scheme of the cosmos, everything comes to be determined by human behavior and ironically expels the possibility of divine grace or revelation. Therefore, the hiddenness of Wisdom preserves God's transcendence and freedom to bestow grace. What is implied here is not negligible: the apocalyptic Wisdom tradition establishes the hidden nature of Wisdom, a perspective which Christianity surely adopts.