I know it’s been a minute but happy Women’s History Month. This week we’re starting a new series. It’s a deeper dive into the lives of women in scripture: Sarah, Eve, and a few others you may not be so familiar with. But to kick us off, this episode titled (En)gendering Wisdom explores how Scripture talks about the work of Holy Wisdom and the role of women in some surprisingly similar ways.
Anchor
"For whoever finds me [Wisdom] finds life and obtains favor from the LORD." Proverbs 8:35
He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD. Proverbs 18:22
Sea
When I first started Chasing After Wind, I received a few questions about why I sometimes use She to refer to the Holy Spirit. Ummm… because the Bible sometimes does.
It turns out there is a long and early tradition substantiated by Scripture that identifies the Lady Wisdom of Proverbs as the third member of the Godhead, most commonly referred to in the New Testament as the Holy Spirit.
I won't go too much into this point. Still, the Person of Eternal Wisdom in Proverbs, the Dwelling Place and Shekinah Glory of God (which are both described as God), and the Hebrew/Aramaic word for Spirit, ruach/rucha, are all associated with feminine gender and female terminology. These examples and others point to Lady Wisdom as a feminine image of God in Scripture, after whom women take our innate essence and pivotal role within society.
You might not be convinced. And that's okay. A future newsletter will spend time unpacking each of these references. But before you dismiss this idea as only hinging on a few pesky Hebrew pronouns, take a look at the two Proverbs verses from our anchor.
I'll point out the obvious. These verses are almost identical.
Lady Wisdom and a wife are both described as favor from God. The Hebrew word for favor, ratson, is related to the Greek word charis, meaning grace, unmerited favor, and God-given empowerment. When people find Wisdom and when a man finds a good woman, they are empowered by God with His favor. You mean, women are uniquely designed to be agents of Wisdom and grace?! What?! Okay, God.
Let's keep going. Notice what Lady Wisdom says about herself in Chapter 8: "Whoever finds me finds life," Hebrew hay. Wisdom makes an equivalence between herself and life. What does Adam call his wife in Genesis chapter 4? Hawwa.
Hawwa,which translates to life-giver, sounds like the Hebrew Word for "living." As humans are all born of Hawwa/Eve, believers must also be born a second time of the Holy Spirit, who is none other than Proverb's Wisdom.
Check this out: "Wisdom will crown your head with grace, giving you a headdress of glory." That’s Proverbs 4: 9." Now, Proverbs 12: 4 says, “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband."
What I'm telling y'all is I'm excavating a deepening Biblical foundation for the connection between the identity of Solomon's Divine Wisdom/Jesus's Great Counselor and the role of women. This is not about saying that God is a woman, nor is it primarily about marital relationships. Rather this insight is about understanding how all the genders jointly and uniquely work to express the complexity of the Godhead. Just as the world is given Christ before the Spirit, Adam precedes Eve, yet the two remain intimately tied. When the first man was all on his own, God said it wasn't good, lo to-wb, but when a man finds a wife he finds good, to-wb.
Jesus says it’s better for him to leave so that the Holy Spirit could come. Both Eve and the Spirit are associated with some kind of necessary improvement.
Could it be that Eve, Adam's ezer kenegdo, or his 'God-given, Divine Help,' reflects the Helper of John 14:16? This Helper is characterized by the powerful strength of a Rescuer and carries the wise and dexterous understanding of a skilled Defense Attorney. Helper here does not connote inferiority. So let's get it straight: the Holy Spirit is not Jesus' errand boy and Eve was not Adam's secretary. She was called to be his lieutenant, his right hand, his trusted counselor and confidant, and he, hers.
So why does all this talk about women and Wisdom matter?
I make this point—not to be controversial—but because of a failure. I failed identify how women image God in our larger society, churches, and relationships, despite being one. And I know I’m not alone in this. I have often heard how men were created in God's image to be the leader, head, or priest of the house, but rarely hear about how women and our foremother, Eve, uniquely image God—and definitely not in a mixed-gender audience. Shout out to my homie Blair for being the exception.
More crucially, I sense we are missing something about God, the Holy Spirit. We treat the Spirit more like an “it” than a whole Person. Sometimes we also treat women, especially wives and mothers, this way—like servants.
As a black woman, I understand this all too well. I was recently at a friend of mine’s house. She happens to be white. Another woman (also white) stopped by to drop something off and asked my friend if I was her helper? Like the only reason I could possibly be there would be as the help, not as a friend. I was polite but internally I seethed.
The Holy Spirit isn’t that kind of help. She is God in the form of Life, Insight and Power. From Jesus' perspective, the All-Wise Spirit is not something useful to be obtained but Someone eternal we can know.
Wisdom doesn’t accumulate based on facts. Wisdom reveals Herself to us. Like a friend at the door, we are meant to receive Her into our house and heed the news She brings.
So this month, we will focus on the Wisdom and Word of God as revealed to and through women. Each week, we will gaze a little bit at the life of one woman God encountered in the Bible—because the gospel story is not only God breaking the curse on Adam, it is also fulfilling His promise about Eve that her seed, "the seed of the woman” would crush the serpent's head. The gospel is a continuation of the covenant to Abraham AND the fulfillment of the promise about Sarah that "I will bless her, and moreover I will give [Abraham] a son by her. I will bless her, and she shall become nations; kings of peoples shall come from her."
During this Women's History Month, I invite you to get to know God's word to women and God's work in women.
My prayer is for the fulfillment of Proverbs 8 in our lives, that we become more intimate with Divine Wisdom, that we find life, rejoice in God's favor, and recognize ourselves as God’s very good thing.
Verily,
Alysia
Sail
The poem for this week is a video of my piece ‘Will Not Go Without’ with my friend and incredible musician J.P. Cooper. J.P. wrote this song about his mother who passed and in response, I wrote this poem about my mother who has been my anchor all my life.
I struggle with translating Eve’s role as a “help-mate.” Like what even is a help mate? But when I think about an ezer kenegdo being a “God-given, life-rescuing, necessary help” that’s definitely who my mom has been to me. That’s who Aysha, Melly, Tina, Alayna, Tracelyn, Marilyn, Rachel, Gail, Sarah, Claire, and so many women have been to me. And that’s who the Spirit’s been.
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