Question: Is wisdom a male or female?

Is wisdom a male or female? How can Christ be our Wisdom when Wisdom is a "she" in Proverbs 1-9?

(*Note: This question was asked after someone gave out the book Proverbs by Stephen Kaung to a friend. The friend started to read it and couldn't continue after reading that Christ was Wisdom personified. He was bothered since "wisdom" is described as a female in Proverbs 1-9.) 

In Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a female but is not considered a real person or being. Solomon writes to "my son" as a wise father, "My son, attend unto my wisdom." In talking with a male son about receiving wisdom, he personifies wisdom as a female. If a wise mother were talking with her daughter, it might be different, and the "strange woman" would be replaced. Wisdom is in contrast with the "strange woman" (harlot) that may be received instead (see especially their calls to the simple in 9:4,16). For the sake of comparison with this foolish way of the strange woman, it is natural that Wisdom would be a female. 

If "she" was "set up from eternity, from the beginning, before the earth was" (8:23), then "she" has to do with God. God is not female but is the creator of male and female genders. The principle of wisdom being labeled with the feminine gender does not touch the masculinity of God since we are not talking about a real being.

 

Christ, the Son of God, has become for us Wisdom (see 1 Cor 1:30-31). He really is Wisdom personified—as a real Person. He actually was there "in the beginning" (John 1:1), and by him, all things were created (Col 1:16). In Proverbs Wisdom was there at the creation of the heavens and earth (8:27-31). We aren't to take this to mean that a real being, feminine in nature, was there with God at creation. But we realize that "When he prepared the heavens," wisdom "was there"— as God created, wisdom was used. God is wise and creates wisely.

 

If we can see that the gender of wisdom in Proverbs 1-9 is for the sake of explanation and not a literal teaching about a person, then we won't try to compare the masculinity of a real Person, Christ, with the femininity of an abstract principle of wisdom. We are "communicating spiritual things by spiritual means" (I Cor. 2:13) when we bring up how Christ is our Wisdom. He, the real Person, actually does cry out in the same way as Wisdom in the book of Proverbs cries out. On the surface of the cry of Wisdom, we realize that it is the principle of wisdom and not someone real—that principle may be described as a female for the sake of understanding or comparison. But now that Christ the real Person has become our Wisdom, we may apply the same "cry" from Proverbs to our real Wisdom from God—Christ.