While composing an essay for a course on the Old Testament, my postgraduate college, St. Chad’s college (Durham University), was requesting articles for an internal publication. I submitted this piece of work and it was accepted. The postgrad journal was distributed to members of the college in 2014. Here it is, reproduced, for, hopefully, a slightly larger audience.

The article is about possible authorial intentions behind the figure of Lady Wisdom who appears in the Book of Proverbs. It was challenging to research and write this within the stipulated time frame, especially since my undergraduate degree was in another discipline and I was simultaneously attempting to learn koine Greek and classical Hebrew.

My Professor, Dr Angela Harkins, is an incredibly knowledgeable person and all round great teacher. It was a privilege to be supervised by her. As with everything to be posted on this blog from university and grad school, it received top grades and has contributed new knowledge to the area of inquiry.

The Enigma of Lady Wisdom: External Foreign Deity, Internal Hypostasis or simply an Amalgamated Literary Figure?

Introduction

Wisdom literature from the Second Temple period has been a perennial object of lively discussion in biblical scholarship concerning, among other things, their precise dates of composition, their history of redaction, their intertextuality with Israel’s Ancient Near Eastern neighbours, and their theological significance. Within the Hebrew Bible, and specifically concerning the book of Proverbs, these speculations have been exacerbated by the difficulty of dating the many independent units that make it up. This is because, unlike some other books, like parts of the Book of Kings in the Historical Books in the Christian Canon, these disparate proverbial sayings are not tied to a coherent and identifiable historical context supported by extra-biblical corroboration. [1] Consequently, form criticism is also less useful in determining their dates and contexts. [2] Furthermore, they lack consistency with the rest of the Hebrew Bible’s strong emphasis on ‘covenant, election or law’. [3]

The personification of Lady Wisdom in the first unit of Proverbs, that is, 1-9, generally held by scholars to be the latest unified addition to the book, has itself engendered a sizeable critical legacy concerned with, on the one hand, its possible intertextuality with foreign female divinities, and on the other, its somewhat overlapping significance as a kind of hypostatization [4] of an attribute of their God. This concept of Lady Wisdom, as a hypostatization, which was further developed in the later Wisdom of Solomon and Ben Sira, was eventually interpreted to support a Christology in John’s gospel and the writings of the Church Fathers. [5] It has been assumed in both cases that it was the intention of the original authors for Lady Wisdom to be understood as a kind of divine figure, which would render it amenable to its future theological interpretations. With the aid of recent contributions to biblical scholarship in this area, this brief article seeks to make the case that, while there is some possible evidence for Lady Wisdom’s intertextuality with foreign female divinities and unquestionable evidence for its later use by the writers of the New Testament and the Church Fathers to reveal an implicit Christology in the Hebrew Bible, [6] the portrayal of Lady Wisdom primarily in Proverbs 8.22-31 and 1.22-31, and wherever else she is invoked in the 1-9 unit, probably did not have intrinsic divine significance of either kind that is traceable to authorial intent. 

Concerning External Intertextuality with Foreign Female Divinities

To defend this thesis, this article will first seek to show that Lady Wisdom was probably not an externally borrowed divinity from Israel’s Ancient Near Eastern neighbours. Charles T. Fritsch, representing somewhat older scholarship, in The Interpreter’s Bible, identifies Lady Wisdom as a hypostatization of Canaanite derivation. Also, against the mainstream scholarly consensus that the Proverbs 1-9 unit was most probably the latest composition and addition to the book, [7] he argues that because chapters 8-9 ‘point to strong Ugaritic and Phoenician influence’, they are ‘one of the oldest parts of the book’. Unfortunately, while he provides evidence that is ‘closer in thought than in mode of expression’ for the other sections’ connections with foreign literature like the Mesopotamian Proverbs of Ahikar, and the generally agreed upon Egyptian Teaching of Amenemope with the 22.17 – 24.22 unit, he does not provide any direct examples for his claim regarding Lady Wisdom. [8]

Three responses may be given in opposition to Fritsch’s thesis. (1) It is important to note that evidence for intertextuality between Proverbs and Ancient Near East sources with female divinities does not constitute sufficient proof that Lady Wisdom is therefore also a borrowed divinity. Among the few newer scholars who agree with the possibility of dating the Proverbs 1-9 unit outside of the Persian or Hellenistic Period to an earlier time when Ancient Near East intertextuality could constitute a stronger probability is Nili Shupak, who, in her article, compares the strange or foreign woman and Lady Wisdom with Egyptian instructional literature discussed in H. W. Fischer-Elfert’s ‘Abseits von Ma’at: Fallstudien zu Aussenseitern im Alten Ägypten’. Her thesis is that the strange or foreign woman and Lady Wisdom are derived from ‘practical instructions based on an everyday reality that fill the purpose of didactic literature’ designed to teach youths to avoid adulterous women, a theme that has been prevalent in the Egyptian literature since the 3rd Millennium BCE. While she also notes that ‘in the present instance one cannot speak unequivocally of Egyptian influence on Proverbs’, [9] her article shows that even if intertextuality with foreign sources that do have female divinities can be evidenced, one cannot justifiably affirm that Lady Wisdom was modelled after their attendant divinities – in Egypt’s case, these would be Ma’at and Isis – in the absence of direct linguistic correspondence. Supporting this principle, another scholar, Michael Fox provides an example from within Egyptian literature of ‘Truth and Falsehood’ being allegorically personified but are ‘written with the sign used to designate humans’, unlike Sia or Ma’at who were understood to be personifications of divine attributes. This, he argues, shows that ‘personification does not in itself indicate hypostatization, even in a culture with numerous hypostases’. [10]   

(2) Among the scholars who accept the possibility that Lady Wisdom has had conscious foreign antecedents, the consensus is that it was nevertheless re-appropriated to fit a certain religious understanding that would exclude anything that challenged Jewish concepts of the nature of their God as their one and only. [11] Gerhard von Rad, representing somewhat older scholarship as well, in his classic Wisdom in Israel, begins his discussion of the personification of wisdom with what it ‘really means in the context of Yahwism’, which is a ‘faith in Yahweh as creator’. Given this grounding supposition, he concedes that Lady Wisdom does share some similarities with the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, who, like her, is presented as a child embracing her father. However, von Rad also points out that this only could show that ‘ideas which had their roots elsewhere came to Israel’s help when she needed them’, because in the case of Lady Wisdom, unlike Ma’at, she ‘has no divine status, nor is [she] a hypostasized attribute of Yahweh; [she] is, rather, something created by Yahweh and assigned [her] proper function’. Within his exegesis, which incorporates Job 28 as an important contemporaneous development of the concept of wisdom, the proper function in question is to be ‘an attribute of the world […] by virtue of which she turns towards men to give order to their lives’. [12]

Fox, who is also marginally sympathetic to the intertextual view, begins by arguing that the evidence for a connection to a Canaanite goddess is scant, and as for the Egyptian goddess Ma’at, she ‘never seems to speak at all’, which would be a strange source for Lady Wisdom who likes to give speeches. However, he concedes that the Egyptian goddess Isis, who in the Hellenistic period ‘became the most popular goddess in the Near East’ could have been an influence. However, he also qualifies his concession by noting that ‘even if this background could be confirmed, it would not mean that Lady Wisdom is an Isis figure’, rather her similarities with Isis would have served to ‘displace Isis in Hellenistic Jewish sentiments’. [13] Therefore, Fox, as with von Rad, argues that Isis would have been used as a tool in the service of Jewish theology, and so would not have been understood or composed intentionally as such to have a kind of divine significance that would challenge devotion to their God commanded in the Sh’ma. [14]   

(3) Some scholars think that there is not enough evidence to justifiably say that Lady Wisdom was influenced by foreign deities at all. Concerning method, Stuart Weeks argues that regarding the biblical Wisdom literature’s similarities with Egyptian or Mesopotamian sources, ‘general resemblance’ does not necessarily imply ‘specific dependence’, and in the case of older works, ‘there is no reason to suppose that the Jewish writers could easily have read or understood texts in archaic languages such as Sumerian or Middle Egyptian, or even Akkadian and the later forms of Egyptian’. Regarding Lady Wisdom specifically, he argues that Isis only became internationally famous ‘later than most scholars would date Proverbs 1-9’. Furthermore, he also points out that Ma’at was actually a personified literary concept and was only presented as a goddess in artistic depictions, so Jewish writers could not have ‘acquired their familiarity [with a deified Ma’at] from any reading of Egyptian instructional literature’. He concludes by noting that ‘in the end, it is hard either to prove or disprove that the depiction of Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 has been influenced, directly or indirectly, by representations of goddesses in the literature, liturgy, or iconography of other countries’. [15]

This section has endeavoured to show that the case for Lady Wisdom’s divine significance via external intertextuality with Ancient Near East sources is weak. In other words, it is not likely that Lady Wisdom was a borrowed foreign female deity, and even if she were, she would be divested of any kind of theological significance that would threaten to displace Jewish devotion to their God. In the following section, this article will examine Lady Wisdom’s depiction internal to the Hebrew Bible, and seek to make a similar case for her non-hypostatization.   

Concerning Internal Significance as a Hypostatization of YHWH

It will be helpful first to reproduce the relevant sections of the personification of Lady Wisdom that concerns the thesis of this article.

20 Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
21 At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
22 “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
23 Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.
24 Because I have called and you refused,
have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,
25 and because you have ignored all my counsel
and would have none of my reproof,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when panic strikes you,
27 when panic strikes you like a storm,
and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you.
28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer;
they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge
and did not choose the fear of the Lord,
30 would have none of my counsel,
and despised all my reproof,
31 therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way
and be sated with their own devices.
32 For waywardness kills the simple,
and the complacency of fools destroys them;
33 but those who listen to me will be secure
and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”

Proverbs 8.22-31 (NRSV)

22 The Lord created me at the beginning of his work,
the first of his acts of long ago.
23 Ages ago I was set up,
at the first, before the beginning of the earth.
24 When there were no depths I was brought forth,
when there were no springs abounding with water.
25 Before the mountains had been shaped,
before the hills, I was brought forth—
26 when he had not yet made earth and fields,
or the world’s first bits of soil.
27 When he established the heavens, I was there,
when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
28 when he made firm the skies above,
when he established the fountains of the deep,
29 when he assigned to the sea its limit,
so that the waters might not transgress his command,
when he marked out the foundations of the earth,
30 then I was beside him, like a master worker;
and I was daily his delight,
rejoicing before him always,
31 rejoicing in his inhabited world
and delighting in the human race.

Two discrete sets of evidence commonly cited for Lady Wisdom’s divine qualities are in translations wherein she seems to be described as God’s co-eternal co-creator in 8.22 and 8.30a and her prophetic and divine voice in 1.22-31. Alan Lenzi pairs Proverbs 3.19 – ‘The Lord by Wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens’ – with 8.22 to argue for the translation that God “acquires” rather than “creates” wisdom in 8.22, which implies that she is not a created thing but is co-eternal with him, who acquired her. He also argues for intertextuality, but one that does not feature ‘an exact semantic parallel’, of the depiction of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8.22-31 with the birth narrative of the creator god Marduk in the Mesopotamian creation narrative Enuma Elish, which renders 8.30a amenable to the translation that Wisdom is an artisan ‘through which and with whom he creates the world’. [16] Similarly, David Noel Freedman sees Proverbs 8.22-31 as creation theology, [17] and, combining the evidence in Proverbs 1.22-31 of personified wisdom’s prophetic and divine roles of exhortation and laughter at and refusal to hear the cries of those who originally ‘ignored all [her] counsel’ [18] evidenced elsewhere in the speeches of the prophets and of God in the Hebrew Bible respectively, argues that she has ‘become more than just a prophetic figure but also something that merges egos with the divine’. [19]

Concerning Lady Wisdom’s seeming divine and prophetic role, Fox argues that robust and consistent parallels between her speeches and either the divine or the prophetic voice cannot be found. While he concedes that Lady Wisdom’s reproofs echo prophetic behaviour, Amos’ and Ezekiel’s in particular, he attributes that similarity ‘to the fact that prophets sometimes take on a teacher’s role’, which is essentially all that Lady Wisdom’s behaviour could amount to. Furthermore, ‘Wisdom neither declares God’s judgment nor claims to be mediating his word, which is a prophet’s defining role’. And as for her divine persona that ignores the cries of fools, which is how ‘God behaves toward unworthy supplicants’, Fox notes that ‘unlike God, Wisdom does not herself execute retribution’. Fox concludes that any view of Lady Wisdom has to take account of the ‘variety of persons in the sketch’ that make her up. Therefore for him it is more likely that she is simply ‘a new and independent literary figure [that] has been composed of fragments of reality’, [20] whose amalgamated literary significance will be touched upon at this article’s conclusion.

Concerning her co-eternal and co-creator status alongside God, largely legitimised by the translations ‘acquired’ rather than ‘created’, in 8.22 and ‘artisan’ or ‘master worker’ in 8.30a, Fox argues for and agrees with the fact that most modern translations prefer ‘created’ as opposed to ‘acquired’ in 8.22 which, at any rate, coheres better with 8.24-5’s language of her being birthed. [21] The issue concerning ‘master worker’ is more complicated because it had already been interpreted as such in the earliest translations and exegetical references along with its theological developments. R. B. Y. Scott notes that the ‘skilled artisan’ reading, which is virtually synonymous with ‘master worker’, is attested to or implied in the Septuagint, the Syriac Peshitta, the Latin Vulgate, the Aramaic Targums, Philo of Alexandria’s writings, and the New Testament, specifically John 1.3 and Colossians 1.16. Scott notes the implication of this translation: ‘if this was the meaning […] intended by the author of Prov. viii it would indicate that he was thinking of Wisdom as something very like an hypostasis’. Nevertheless, Scott also argues that determining the authorial intent of a given text cannot be predicated on ‘later literary allusions since these testify only to different exegetical traditions’, rather it is more important to look at the text itself and see what ‘best suits the context’. He rejects the ‘artisan’ reading because 8.26-29 emphasise repeatedly that God is the one doing the creating. After examining and rejecting other potential translations, he settles on the view that 8.30a should be translated as ‘then I was at his side, a living link’. [22]

Fox also rejects the ‘artisan’ translation because ‘this notion seems to be deliberately repudiated in 8:30-31, which emphasizes that Wisdom played while God worked’, and instead argues for ‘child’ or ‘nursling’ as the best exegetical option beside the language of birthing and playing. He argues that the lengthy description of creation is not there to showcase Wisdom’s creative acts alongside God but rather ‘to celebrate her pre-eminence’ as a being created even before the existence of the primeval ocean, tehomot, which God subdued to create the world, placing the mountains in its sockets to hold up the triple layer of the heavens the earth and Sheol, in traditional Hebrew cosmogony. Fox also notes that Lady Wisdom ‘has three designations: hokmah, binah, and tebunah’, throughout the 1-9 unit, [23] which is not appropriate for a stable hypostasis whom one would expect would have only one name.

Weeks’ article ‘The Context and Meaning of Proverbs 8:30a’ also argues against ‘master worker’ as a good option because it has problems with precedent. Weeks notes that one will have difficulty trying to explain ‘why the active role of Wisdom is introduced only at this late point in the poem mentioned nowhere else in Proverbs 1-9’. Concerning the possible exception at 3.19-20, he maintains that the Wisdom there is portrayed ‘more specifically as a tool or an attribute, not an actor in creation’. He argues that 8.30a is linked not to the preceding creation verses as a kind of completion of their consecutive ‘temporal expression’ which would lend itself to a ‘craftsman’ reading as a kind of fitting climax, but rather it is linked to the verse that comes after it. Therefore Weeks argues that 8.30a is not about the time before creation, but about the time after creation, in which case ‘faithful’ would fit better. Consequently, he translates the verse as such: ‘And I have remained at his side faithfully, and I remain delightedly, day after day’. He concludes therefore that ‘the verse is not a cosmological assertion of Wisdom’s intrinsic nature or role at creation, but, like the rest of the poem, it is an assertion of Wisdom’s value and reliability’. [24]  

Conclusion

Given the weight of the recent converging scholarly consensus and the force of their arguments, it seems that, on the one hand, Lady Wisdom was probably not intended to be a borrowed divinity from Israel’s Ancient Near East neighbours for the three reasons stated in the first main section of this article. On the other hand, the following section also shows that evidence for her hypostatization predicated on translations of 8.22 and 30a, and her divine persona in 1.22-31 are also far from agreed upon by the scholarly consensus. In addition to that, scholars have also cited a host of problems with a clear hypostatization reading of Lady Wisdom notwithstanding the weight of subsequent interpretive glosses since these are not predicated on authorial intent but on later ‘exegetical traditions’, [25] each with their theological suppositions. In its place, they have offered more conservative and contextually appropriate explanations for the personification of Wisdom. Weeks posits that the personification is ‘merely adopting a style imposed by its context, where a speech by Wisdom is required in response to the previous speech by the foreign woman’. [26] Fox also notes that ‘everything in the chapter [including her personification] serves the rhetorical goal of influencing the reader to desire wisdom’. [27] This begs the question: what concept of wisdom is being endorsed here; can it be harmonized with other Judaic engagements with wisdom in the Second Temple Period; and what would it mean for modern faith communities to appropriate these disparate insights? These questions are perennially discussed in biblical scholarship. [28]

While Lady Wisdom continues to be a conceptual enigma because of her possible intertextuality with foreign female divinities as well as her rather significant historical interpretation as a prefigured Christ in the New Testament and appearance in later Christological controversies, [29] this article has endeavoured to show that the evidence for either is insufficient to justifiably claim that these were also the original authors’ intentions.  

Endnotes

1. For example, the events of the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem in 701 BCE by Sennacherib, mentioned in 2 Kings 18.13-16, are also narrated in ‘several Assyrian sources and are also depicted in the palace reliefs of that king’, Marc Brettler, The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha ed. by Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 316.  
2. Stuart Weeks, An Introduction to the Study of Wisdom Literature (London: T & T Clark, 2010), p. 107. See also Michael V. Fox, The Anchor Bible: Proverbs 1-9 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 6.
3. Weeks, An Introduction, pp. 6, 1.
4. Gerhard von Rad points out that this term has become problematically ‘loaded’ and has chosen to ‘avoid it completely’. See his Wisdom in Israel (London: SCM Press, 1972), p. 147 footnote. Fox’s definition, which is the implicit definition supposed by this article, is simply ‘mythic objectifications or personifications of divine qualities, gifts or attributes or of abstract concepts or aspects of human existence, whereby such entities assume an identity of their own’, Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 353. 
5. R. B. Y. Scott, ‘Wisdom in Creation: The ‘Amôn of Proverbs VIII 30’, Vetus Testamentum,10 2 (1960), pp. 215, 216. See also Weeks, An Introduction, p. 40.
6. Or, more appropriately, the Septuagint.
7. See Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 6. See also Katharine Dell, ‘The Book of Proverbs’, in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, p. 895.
8. Charles T. Fritsch, The Interpreter’s Bible, ed. by George Arthur Buttrick (New York: Abingdon Press, 1955), pp. 767, 775, 768, 767, 768.
9. Nili Shupak, ‘Female Imagery in Proverbs 1-9 in the Light of Egyptian Sources’, Vetus Testamentum, 61 (2011), pp. 312, 313, 323. The Egyptian sources she cites are The Instruction of Ptahhotep, The Instruction of Ani, and the Demotic Instructions. 
10. Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 331.
11. See Deuteronomy 6.4, also known as the Sh’ma. This uniqueness of Yahweh ‘calls for utter devotion – heart, soul, and might’, Brevard S. Childs, Biblical Theology in the Old and New Testaments (SCM Press, 1992), p. 355.  
12. Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, pp. 144, 156, 153, 156. This position is echoed in H. Gese, ‘Wisdom, Son of Man, and the Origins of Christology’, Horizons in Biblical Theology, 3 (1981), p. 32, whereby ‘in creational order God mediates himself to the world, and in the knowledge of wisdom this mediation is completed’. See his whole article for an in-depth account of the progression of wisdom in Second Temple Judaism which eventually led to its connection to Jesus Christ in the New Testament.    
13. Fox, The Anchor Bible, pp. 335, 336, 337.
14. If one accepts the general scholarly consensus that the Proverbs 1-9 unit was probably compiled in -the Persian or at the very latest, the Hellenistic Period, then the account in Ezra-Nehemiah of the “canonization” of the Torah, which encloses the Sh’ma, for the Jews who returned to Jerusalem at the Persian Ruler Cyrus’s edict would lend credence to this point. 
15. Weeks, An Introduction, pp. 17, 41, 42.
16. Alan Lenzi, ‘Proverbs 8:22-31: Three Perspectives on Its Composition’, JBL, 4 (2006), pp. 696-697, 703, 705. 
17. David Noel Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
18. Proverbs 1.15 NRSV. 
19. Freedman, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. Among other scholars who hold to the ‘artisan’ or ‘master worker’ reading with its attendant theological significance are Mitchell Dahood S. J. in his ‘Proverbs 8,22-31 Translation and Commentary’, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, 30 4 (1968), pp. 512-521, and Fritsch in The Interpreter’s Bible.
20. Fox, The Anchor Bible, pp. 333, 334, 333, 341.
21. Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 279. Von Rad also holds to the ‘created’ view.
22. R. B. Y. Scott, ‘Wisdom in Creation’, pp. 216, 221, 215, 217, 222.
23. Fox, The Anchor Bible, pp. 355, 285, 281, 282, 353.
24. Weeks, ‘The Context and Meaning of Proverbs 8:30a’, JBL, 125 3 (2006), pp. 434, 434 footnote, 437, 438, 440, 442, 441. In his book he provides a very simple apologetic for the non-divinity of Lady Wisdom: since she is intimately connected with her antithesis, the strange or foreign woman, and ‘if Wisdom is supposed recognizably to be a goddess, what does that make the woman?’. Weeks, An Introduction, p. 40. 
25. Scott, ‘Wisdom in Creation’, p. 221.
26. Weeks, An Introduction, p. 41. See also pp. 105-106.
27. Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 293. See also Jane Webster, ‘Sophia: Engendering Wisdom in Proverbs, Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon’, JSOT, 78 (1998), pp. 63-79, who takes a literary approach, for a similar conclusion.
28. Looking at the enormous corpus of wisdom literature in the Ancient Near East, Weeks does not think one can do better than ‘speak of their works loosely as products of a wisdom tradition, which drew on long-established genres linked to exhortation and disputation, was marked by a characteristic style of discourse, and focused on particular problems surrounding the individual human life’, Weeks, An Introduction, p. 144. While Weeks and others have argued that it was probably not in the original authors’ intention for Lady Wisdom to be connected with the Torah, Karel van der Toorn has argued that, because the pre-existence of Wisdom in Proverbs influenced the later assertion of the pre-existence of the Torah in the Mishnah, wisdom became another name for ‘the Book of the Law’, and so for Jews of the Rabbinic Period, to be wise was to submit to the authority of the pre-existent Torah. See Karel van der Toorn, The Image and the Book (Peeters, 1998), pp. 245-46.
29. ‘In the fourth century, Prov 8.22 became a crux interpretation that pivoted on the question of whether Christ was coeval with the Father (Athanasius) or was his creation (Arians)’, operating on the early and widely held assumption that 8.30a should be translated ‘master worker’, Fox, The Anchor Bible, p. 279. As an important aside, this article is not attempting to imply that Christological reflections on Proverbs and theology derived from those reflections are mistaken. Approximations to authorial intent, which is one of the goals of the historical-critical method, is not considered a normative requirement for theological interpretation of scripture as suits the needs of the Church. For a brief discussion of this, see Walter Moberly, The Bible, Theology and Faith: A Study of Abraham and Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chapter 1. For a substantive engagement with this issue, see Francis Watson, Text, Church and World (London: T&T Clark, 2004).