that they had spoken a blessing to an infidel, they hurried back to ask for the blessing back again. The word was like a thing which could be sent out to do things and which could be brought back again. In ‘The First Settler’s Story’, Will Carleton, the poet, expresses something like that:
Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds;
You can’t do that way when you’re flying words:
‘Careful with fire,’ is good advice we know,
‘Careful with words,’ is ten times doubly so.
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead,
But God himself can’t kill them when they’re said.
We can well understand how to the people of the middle east words had an independent, power-filled existence.
(2) The Old Testament is full of that general idea of the power of words. Once Isaac had been deceived into blessing Jacob instead of Esau, nothing he could do could take that word of blessing back again (Genesis 27). The word had gone out and had begun to act, and nothing could stop it. In particular, we see the word of God in action in the creation story. At every stage of it, we read: ‘And God said . . .’ (Genesis 1:3, 6, 11). The word of God is the creating power. Again and again we get this idea of the creative, acting, dynamic word of God. ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made’ (Psalm 33:6). ‘He sent out his word and healed them’ (Psalm 107:20). ‘He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly’ (Psalm 147:15). ‘So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and succeed in the thing for which I sent it’ (Isaiah 55:11). ‘Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces?’ (Jeremiah 23:29). ‘You spoke at the beginning of creation, and said on the first day, “Let heaven and earth be made,” and your word accomplished the work’ (4 Ezra [2 Esdras] 6:38). The writer of the Book of Wisdom addresses God as the one ‘who have made all things by your word’ (Wisdom 9:1). Everywhere in the Old Testament there is this idea of the powerful, creative word. Even human words have a kind of dynamic activity; how much more must it be so with God?
(3) There came into Hebrew religious life something which greatly accentuated the development of this idea of the word of God. For 100 years and more before the coming of Jesus, Hebrew was a forgotten language. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, but the Jews no longer knew the language. The scholars knew it, but not the ordinary people. They spoke a development of Hebrew called Aramaic, which relates to Hebrew rather as modern English relates to Anglo-Saxon. Since that was so, the Scriptures of the Old Testament had to be translated into this language that the people could understand, and these translations were called the Targums. In the synagogue, the Scriptures were read in the original Hebrew, but then they were translated into Aramaic, and Targums were used as translations.
The Targums were produced in a time when people were fascinated by the transcendence of God and could think of nothing but the distance and the difference of God. Because of that, those who made the Targums were very much afraid of attributing human thoughts and feelings and actions to God. To put it in technical language, they made every effort to avoid anthropomorphism in speaking of him.
Now the Old Testament regularly speaks of God in a human way; and wherever they met a thing like that, the Targums substituted the word of God for the name of God. Let us see how this custom worked. In Exodus 19:17, we read that ‘Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God.’ The Targums thought that was too human a way to speak of God, so they said that Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet the word of God. In Exodus 31:13, we read that God said to the people that the Sabbath ‘is a sign between me and you throughout your generations’. That was far too human a way to speak for the Targums, and so they said that the Sabbath is a sign ‘between my word and you’. Deuteronomy 9:3 says that God is a consuming fire, but the Targums translated it that the word of God is a consuming fire. Isaiah 48:13 has a great picture of creation: ‘My hand laid the foundation of the earth, and my right hand spread out the heavens.’ That was much too human a picture of God for the Targums, and they made God say: ‘By my word I have founded the earth; and by my strength I have hung up the heavens.’ Even so wonderful a passage as Deuteronomy 33:27 which in the Authorized and Revised Standard Versions speaks of God’s ‘everlasting arms’ was changed, and became: ‘The eternal God is thy refuge, and by his word the world was created.’
In the Jonathan Targum, the phrase the word of God occurs no fewer than about 320 times. It is quite true that it is simply a roundabout way of referring to the name of God; but the fact remains that the word of God became one of the commonest forms of Jewish expression. It was a phrase which any devout Jew would recognize because he heard it so often in the synagogue when Scripture was read. Every Jew was used to speaking of the Memra, the word of God.
(4) At this stage, we must look more fully at something we already began to look at in the introduction. The Greek term for word is Logos; but Logos does not only mean word; it also means reason. For John, and for all the great thinkers who made use of this idea, these two meanings were always closely intertwined. Whenever they used Logos, the twin ideas of the word of God and the reason of God were in their minds.
The Jews had a type of literature called The Wisdom Literature which was the concentrated wisdom of sages. It is not usually speculative and philosophical, but practical wisdom for the living and management of life. In the Old Testament, the great example of Wisdom Literature is the Book of Proverbs. In this book, there are certain passages which give a mysterious life-giving and eternal power to Wisdom (Sophia). In these passages Wisdom has been, as it were, personified, and is thought of as the eternal agent and co-worker of God. There are three main passages.
The first is Proverbs 3:13–26. Out of that passage we may specially note:
She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called happy. The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew. (Proverbs 3:18–20)
We remember that Logos means word and also means reason. We have already seen how the Jews thought of the powerful and creative word of God. Here we see the other side beginning to emerge. Wisdom is God’s agent in enlightenment and in creation; and wisdom and reason are very much the same thing. We have seen how important Logos was in the sense of word; now we see it beginning to be important in the sense of wisdom or reason.
The second important passage is Proverbs 4:5–13. In it we may notice:
Keep hold of instruction; do not let go; guard her, for she is your life.
The word and wisdom are both seen as the light of life for all people. The two ideas are amalgamating with each other rapidly now.
The most important passage of all is Proverbs 8:1–9:2. In it we may specially note:
The Lord created me [Wisdom is speaking] at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth – when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress
