Proverbs 8:24-25 & 30

Is Proverbs 8 About Jesus?

In Proverbs 8:24 and 25, the speaker says, "I was brought forth" before the earth was created. In Proverbs 8:30, the speaker self-identifies as the "master worker" whom God used to create the earth. Who is the speaker in Proverbs 8:24, 25 and 30?

Is it Jesus as you have been told to believe? The answer is found in the rest of Proverbs, which is a book of instructions on wisdom written mostly by Solomon, who famously asked God to give him "wisdom" (1 Chronicles 1:10) and received it; most of the 31 Proverbs specifically mention "wisdom."

Proverbs is also set in Hebrew poetry, and for poetic vividness, wisdom is personified - ie. depicted as if it were a person - in Proverbs 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, and 9. For example, Proverbs 1:20 says, as shown on this page and copied below (Hebrew is read from right to left), "Wisdom calls aloud outside; she raises her voice in the open squares."

As underlined in red above, the "3fs" designation under the two Hebrew words translated "She raises her voice" means "third person feminine singular," so the speaker is definitely female. And that is why, as you can see in this page, all English Bibles translate these two words with the third person feminine singular pronouns "she" and "her." The only exception is the New World Translation, which, because calling wisdom "she" and "her" would make it difficult to claim that wisdom is Jesus, changed "she" to "it" and "her" to "its," hoping that nobody would notice.

But there is another word that they couldn't change as it would have been too noticeable: "sister" in Proverbs 7:4, which reads in the New World Translation: "Say to wisdom, 'You are my sister,' and call understanding 'my relative.' " A sister is someone who is obviously female, and the Bible never identifies Jesus as someone who is female. Since the speaker of the words in Proverbs 8:24, 25 and 30 is identified in Proverbs 8:12 as "I, wisdom," it is simply wisdom, not Jesus.

Proverbs 8:24, 25 and 30 are simply saying that God created the earth with wisdom, which is nothing new since it was already declared earlier in Proverbs 3:19, which reads in the New World Translation, "Jehovah founded the earth in wisdom."