Canaanite and Israelite tradition celebrated Sophia as divine being or agent in creation, providence, and salvation well into Second Temple Judaism producing two strands of Sophianology which influenced biblical interpretation in Gnostic, Rabbinic, and Christian thought. Enochian apocalyptic tradition shaped Gnostic and Christian hermeneutics; while the wisdom traditions of Ben Sirach and Philo expressed the type of perspective more plainly evident in Rabbinic thought. By the fourth century CE, Sophia, the preexistent deity or deity agent who gave form to the universe and wisdom to the pious and learned, became the immanent human experience of illumination and wisdom, in that, for Rabbinics, Torah became the preexistent source of redemptive divine wisdom and power, and for Christianity Jesus took that place. Gnosticism persisted in an apocalyptic model with a deified though ambiguous Sophia, uneclipsed by a redemptive agent such as Jesus or Torah.
The Book of Proverbs presents Sophia as a personalized agent of divine action. Here she is not strictly a hypostatization of God, in that she is created by God rather than an emanation.1 In Sirach this personalization is extended even further, as in many other strains of Second Temple Judaism, such as the identification of Sophia with both Christ and the Holy Spirit in that form of Judaism which came to be known as Christianity.2
Philo, on the other hand, worked assiduously against such personalizations and personifications of divine functions and attributes, treating the phenomena consistently as figures of speech, metaphors, similes, and the like. Philo did apparently hypostatize the Logos, and even went so far as to refer to it metaphorically as a second God, though it is my judgment that even there he intended to speak figuratively and employ a playful use of language. It seems, generally to have been Philo’s conscious agenda to rid Judaism of the Intermediary Theologies which were rampant in Second Temple Judaism’s use of such entities as the hypostatized and personalized Sophia, and thus aggressively protect monotheistic purity and integrity.3
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Author: J. Harold Ellens
Keywords: Shema, Christology, Trinity, Triunity, Three in one, God the Son, Preexistence, Pre-existence, Preexistence of Jesus, Preexisent Jesus, Preexistent Christ, Christ's preexistence, Christ's pre-existence, Christ preexisted, Christ pre-existed, Jesus preexisted, Jesus' preexistence, Jesus' pre-existence, Jesus pre-existed, Preexist, Pre exist, Jesus was the Word, The Word was Jesus, Word was God, Messiah, Deity of Christ, Deity of Jesus, Jesus's preexistence, Jesus preexisted before he was born, Spirit of Messiah, Jewish preexistence, Jewish concept of preexistence, Jewish concept of pre-existence, Jewish understanding of pre-existence, Jewish understanding of preexistence, Jewish understanding of preexistence of Messiah, Messiah's preexistence, Messiah preexisted, Messiah pre-existed, Messiah's pre-existence, Unitarian, Eternal sonship, Eternal son, Eternal sonship of Jesus, Wisdom, Wisdom personified, Sophia, Sophia personified, personification, Word made flesh
Bible reference(s): 2 Kings 19:25, Psalms 139:16, Proverbs 1:20, Pro 3:19-20, Pro 8, Jer. 1:5, Matthew 25:34, John 1:1-2, John 6:33, John 6:38, John 6:58, John 8:58, John 17:5, John 17:24, Acts 2:23, Acts 15:18, Romans 4:17, Romans 8:29, Romans 16:25, 1 Corinthians 2:7, Galatians 1:15, Ephesians 1:4, 2 Thessalonians 2:13, 2 Timothy 1:9, Titus 1:2, Hebrews 7:9, 1 Peter 1:20, Revelation 13:8, Revelation 17:8, Sirach 1:1, Sirach 1:4, Sir 24:8-9
Source: “Sophia in Rabbinic Hermeneutics and the Curious Christian Corollary,” The Interpretation of the Bible (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), pp. 521-46.
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