IN THE BOOK OF PROVERBS, Wisdom is a woman. "The Lord created me at the beginning of his work," she says (8:22). She was there when he made the heaven, the sea, the earth. It was as if he needed a woman's imagination to help him make them, a woman's eye to tell him if he'd made them right, a woman's spirit to measure their beauty by. "I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always," she says (8:30), as if it was her joy in what he was creating that made creation bearable, and that's why he created her first.
Wisdom is a matter not only of the mind but of the heart, like a woman's wisdom. It is born out of suffering, as a woman bears a child. It shows a way through the darkness the way a woman stands at the window holding a lamp. "Her ways are ways of pleasantness," says Solomon, then adding, just in case there should be any lingering question as to her gender, "and all her paths are peace" (3:17).
-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words
