Re: Naked Bible 175: Hebrews 1:1-4
The Septuagint was the “Bible” in use in the first century churches until rather late in the century. It included several books that aren’t part of our canon (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and 1-2 Maccabees). Taken together, there is a strong Hebrew legacy of referring to Wisdom and the Word of God using the same language. The New Testament writers referred to Jesus frequently as the Living Word of God. However, while wisdom is included in His attributes, you won’t often see Him equated with the personification of the ancient Divine Wisdom.
Have you noticed that Proverbs starts off talking about Wisdom as a female figure? In chapter 8, she talks about being there before the beginning with God, even as co-creator. A couple of those non-canonical books in the Septuagint do something similar. The reason is quite simple: In Hebrew grammar, “wisdom” is a feminine noun. Not a female, per se, but it’s one of those arbitrary things the Hebrew language inherited from its predecessors.
Were you aware that, in German language, a “girl” is actually neuter? It’s das Mädchen – “the girl” – having “das” as a neuter article. It’s the same with infants: das Baby (a word borrowed from English and pronounced the same) regardless of the child’s sex. Gendered grammar does some odd things in languages that preserve a gendered association. German goes on to make forks feminine (die Gabel), spoons masculine (der Löffel), and knives neuter (das Messer). Hebrew has some odd grammatical genders, as well.
Thus, in these first few verses of Hebrews we see God’s Son. The Greek text actually refers to Him as a son, one of the bene elohim. He is distinguished by several attributes that are not associated with any of God’s other sons. One of them is co-creator.
Jesus apparently associated Himself with a personified Divine Wisdom figure. Luke 11:49-51 quotes Jesus as saying that Wisdom would send prophets and apostles. Matthew 23:29-36 is a parallel passage of the same comments, but in that version Jesus Himself sends people to speak for God. Thus, only indirectly do we see Jesus making that association.
It goes further. Very early in Hebrew scholarship, the Torah was equated with Divine Wisdom and was also assigned a feminine gender. Both Wisdom and the Torah were regarded as eternal. The writer of Hebrews, fully aware of that tradition, contradicts it somewhat in saying that the revelation through the Old Testament was in bits and pieces, but was presented complete and whole in the person of Jesus.
As Heiser puts it, the Torah did not have the imprint of God’s divine nature. The Torah was not the radiance of divine glory. The Torah was not the agent of Creation. Jesus is everything the Torah was meant to be, plus everything it could not be. It’s guaranteed some the readers of that letter would not be too happy with such statements. It’s a very bold tactic.
For once, we see a Hebrew writer using the concept of ontology because he’s expressing himself in Greek. Jesus is the hypostasis of the Father – a term meaning “essence, actual being, reality”. Jesus was the living manifestation of God in the sense that, as much as anyone can know God, we can know Him by knowing Jesus.
Creation is actively maintained and held together by the living Son of God. These things are not His inheritance, but are attributes that qualify Him to inherit the Name greater than any angel.
