Gilbert House Fellowship

WE RETURN to our regularly scheduled reading this week with proverbs that are paternal calls for wisdom—and a warning against communing with spirits of the dead. Contrary to some who seen in these chapters a female deity named Wisdom, perhaps even the consort of Yahweh, the mundane explanation is simply that the word chokhmah (“wisdom”) is a feminine noun. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with biological gender. So, attempts to see in Proverbs a feminine spirit named Wisdom are misguided—an example of eisegesis, reading a desired, predetermined meaning into the text, rather than exegesis, drawing the intended meaning from the text. We also dig deep into Proverbs 2:18: [F]or her house sinks down to death, and her paths to the departed; We find in the passage what may be a reference to the cult of the dead that surrounded the Israelites. First, the word translated “departed” is rephaim, the spirits of the Nephilim destroyed in the Flood. This is confirmed by the Greek Septuagint, translated about 200 ye