Who wrote the part of the Bible where Wisdom stands up and talks? If your first guess is David, somewhere in the Psalms, you’re wrong. Stick around, though, because by a very strange road you also turn out to be right.
This is the second stop in Arcs Between the Canons, the series that sets Gnostic texts on the same line as the Bible and draws every link between them. The first post left a puzzle on the table. Of the 25 arcs that land in the Psalms, 22 come from a single book, the Pistis Sophia. To see why, we have to follow a woman named Wisdom out of Proverbs and across several centuries of Jewish writing.
The map is focused on three texts here. Thunder and Three Forms of First Thought send a few thin arcs to the wisdom books. The Pistis Sophia sends a whole fan of them into the Psalms, and every arc from all three is gold, which means reinterpretation. Nobody on this map is picking a fight.
She Starts in Solomon’s Book
Personified Wisdom belongs to Proverbs, and Proverbs opens by crediting “Solomon son of David, king of Israel” (I’m quoting the NIV there). So the David hunch is off by one generation. In chapter 8 she takes her stand beside the city gate, and in the NIV’s words “she cries aloud” to anyone walking past.
Then she says something no street preacher would dare. Here’s the King James, whose wording has stuck to this verse for four centuries:
“The LORD possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.”
The Hebrew verb in Proverbs 8:22 is disputed. The NIV has “brought me forth,” and the Greek Septuagint has “created.” Whichever you pick, she’s older than the world. A few lines later she’s at God’s side during creation, “rejoicing in his whole world and delighting in mankind.”
Keep that picture in mind, because she’s happy here. Wisdom in Proverbs likes the earth and likes people, and she has no trouble with the one who made them.
She Goes Looking for a Home
Job 28 had already asked the hard question: “But where shall wisdom be found?” The poem’s answer is that nobody can dig her up. The later wisdom books take that homelessness and turn it into a story.
Jesus son of Sirach, a Jerusalem teacher writing early in the second century BC, gives her a second speech. “I came out of the mouth of the most High,” she says in Sirach 24. She moves through the heavens and the deep searching for a place to rest, until the creator tells her, “Let thy dwelling be in Jacob.” She pitches her tent on Mount Zion.
The Wisdom of Solomon came later, written in Greek, probably in Alexandria, by an author who borrowed Solomon’s name. Its language gets more metaphysical. Wisdom is “the breath of the power of God, and a pure influence flowing from the glory of the Almighty.” She’s starting to sound like something that flows out of God, and a reader in the Greek-speaking world would have heard philosophy in that.
Everything so far is Jewish writing. Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon sit in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, outside the Hebrew and Protestant ones, but they came from the same world as Proverbs.
The essay on Sethian thought in Marvin Meyer’s edition puts the point flatly: Sethian Gnostic thought “had its roots in a form of Jewish speculation on the figure and function of Sophia.” The Gnostics didn’t invent this woman. They inherited her.
The Gnostics Bend Her
What they did with the inheritance is the part that would have startled Ben Sira. According to that same essay, the Sethians divided her work among several figures. An exalted Mother named Barbelo kept the glory, and a lower Sophia became the one who gave rise to the world’s ignorant maker.
I told that story in Sophia: The Wisdom Who Fell and Rose, so I’ll only point at the gap. The Wisdom who rejoiced beside the creator is now the mother of a creator who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Thunder bends her a different way. It never quotes the Bible, but its speaker talks the way she does in Proverbs, in the first person and in public: “I was sent from the power.” Then it does something Proverbs would never allow. Proverbs keeps Wisdom and the foolish woman on opposite sides of the street, and Thunder puts them in one mouth:
“I am the whore and the holy.”
Paul-Hubert Poirier’s introduction in Meyer calls this “a drastic reinterpretation of Jewish Wisdom.” Three Forms of First Thought goes after the Sirach story instead. Its introduction says the search for a dwelling became three descents into the lower world, and the speaker announces, “I am the first one who descended.”
And Then David Comes Back
Now for the book the British Museum bought from a London doctor’s heirs in 1785. The Pistis Sophia finds Sophia trapped in the chaos, her light drained by a lion-faced power, praying to be rescued. I covered her thirteen repentances as a spiritual practice some time ago. What interests me on this map is what happens after each prayer.
A disciple steps forward and explains it, and the explanation is a psalm. Mary goes first. Jesus’s light-power, she tells him, “hath prophesied thereof aforetime through the prophet David,” and she recites the whole thing. Mead’s translation calls it the sixty-eighth Psalm because the text follows the Greek numbering. In an English Bible it’s Psalm 69, headed “A Psalm of David,” and it opens with a man going under:
“Save me, O God; for the waters are come in unto my soul.”
Peter, Martha, John and the others follow, thirteen prayers and thirteen psalms, and the text credits every one to David. So your first guess was right after all. There is a book where Wisdom speaks in the words of David. It just isn’t in the Bible.
Mead numbered the verses, so you can lay the two side by side. Here’s verse 21 of the psalm as Mary recites it:
“They gave me gall for my meat; and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”
And here’s verse 21 of Sophia’s prayer:
“And when I sought the light, they gave me darkness; and when I sought my power, they gave me matter.”
Same shape, same grievance, with the nouns swapped. It happens over and over. The psalmist waits for a comforter and finds none, and Sophia waits for her pair, who “came not.” Whoever composed these prayers worked with the psalm open on the table.
What the Arc Adds Up To
Look at how far she’s traveled. In Proverbs she’s the one people run to. In the Pistis Sophia she’s the one going under, praying the words of a man in trouble. The figure who was there before the mountains ends up needing what the rest of us need.
The direction of these arcs is easy to misread. In his introduction Mead found “no sign of antagonism to Judaism or to the O.T.” in the book, and that’s why the arcs are gold and not red. The psalms are treated as true prophecy, which is a long way from the Secret Book of John correcting Moses.
A fair reader can still object. Psalm 69 is a prayer that belonged to Israel, and here it’s been reassigned to a being its singers never heard of. Christians did something similar long before, hearing the crucifixion in that same verse about the vinegar, so neither side comes to this argument with clean hands. Taking a text over and attacking it are two different acts, and the map’s colors only show you the second one.
Solomon gets pulled in as well. Later in the book, when Sophia sings her thanks, Salome answers with the Odes of Solomon: “Thy power hath prophesied aforetime through Solomon.” Those hymns aren’t in the Bible, so they earn no arc. Still, both men finish up in Sophia’s service, the son whose book gave her a voice and the father whose psalms gave her something to pray.
Three Ways to Try This
- Read the two chapters together. Mead’s 1921 translation is in the public domain and easy to find. Open Psalm 69 next to Sophia’s first repentance and underline every verse where only the nouns changed.
- Hear the distance. Read Proverbs 8:22-31 out loud, then the opening of Thunder. Notice which voice you’d trust with your kids and which one you’d follow into the desert. They may not be the same.
- Do what Mary did, backward. Pick a psalm you know and rewrite five verses with the enemies and waters of your own week. Keep the structure and swap the nouns. You’ll learn quickly why people have been doing this for a couple of thousand years.
The Pistis Sophia’s strangest claim might be its most ordinary one. When things go badly, even Wisdom doesn’t compose something new. She reaches for a song somebody else wrote while drowning.
Proverbs 8:22, Job 28:12, and Psalm 69 are quoted from the King James Version, and Sirach 24 and Wisdom of Solomon 7:25 from its Apocrypha. Proverbs 1:1, 8:3, and 8:31 are from the NIV. Thunder, Three Forms of First Thought, and the introductions and essay named above come from Marvin Meyer’s The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (HarperOne, 2010). The Pistis Sophia, including Mary’s recitation of the psalm, is quoted from G. R. S. Mead’s 1921 translation.
