Wisdom Is a Woman: The Canonical Metaphor of Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 Understood in Light of Theological Aesthetics

In Proverbs 1–9, we are introduced to stunning, scandalous, and mysterious Lady Wisdom. For millennia interpreters have endeavored to explain, simplify, or domesticate the vaunted and varied personification of this woman. In Wisdom Is a Woman, Lance Rundus illustrates that our difficulties with Lady Wisdom run much deeper than uncertainty about her origins and depiction, but are rooted in inherited assumptions about and definitions of metaphor, as well as a distorted disposition toward right hemisphere modes of knowledge that undercut the very attempt at discovering Wisdom at all.
Wisdom Is a Woman invites the reader into the mode of aesthetic perception that opens the way to the beautiful, transcendent intimacy of relational knowledge born from constellations of canonical metaphor in Proverbs 1–9. In “obtaining scale” with Wisdom we discover that this paradoxical wonder is but a faint echo of the wonder and beauty of the Triune God in the person, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Lance Rundus works on the family farm in north central Kansas, and does his best to be a faithful son, husband, father, friend, and servant of God.