Just Throw on Another Gender

Unfortunately, though the dangers of being a worthless, deceptive, and seductive woman have traditionally been seen as literal threats to what a woman can become, the corresponding Biblical archetype has been often treated in two ways. Firstly, it is deemed merely figurative and irrelevant to what God desires women to be. Wisdom being portrayed in the Bible as a woman is thought of as being about as applicable to a woman’s everyday life as the fact that freedom and fidelity are depicted as women. The images are nice, we put them on coins and make nice statues, but this tendency doesn’t really matter, actually, at all.

But I believe it is also significant that wisdom is personified as a woman; she is a model for women also. Just as the gender of the Harlot would be impossible to disregard without distorting the message, so too Lady Wisdom is intentionally spoken of as a woman. You cannot simply throw on another gender to the literary character. It is not fair to say that the seductress is a warning to women specifically but that Lady Wisdom is only feminine in a figurative sense and is not an example to women. Both are figurative, but they are also a picture the polar opposites of what women can become. No one argues whether the Proverbs 31 woman is a literal woman or not; she is applied to women as a woman. In the same way, the Harlot and Lady Wisdom can be applied as model women, for women.