In the Wisdom Literature generally Wisdom is never used in the sense of pure knowledge; in its earliest meaning it connoted the faculty of distinguishing between what was useful or beneficent, and what was harmful; later, more ethically, between what was good and what was bad. In the Wisdom Literature there is always at bottom a _religious_ content in Wisdom; that is to say, it is a divinely bestowed gift the possession of which makes man in some measure like God. To be able to distinguish truly between good and evil is the means whereby man is enabled to stand in close relationship with God. But since the faculty to distinguish between good and evil is a divine endowment, every form of Wisdom comes from God, so that although the knowledge and fear of the Lord is the highest type of Wisdom, there are less exalted forms of it which are also regarded as part of the one great gift of God; that is to say, what is called worldly wisdom does not differ in kind, but only in degree from the higher form. In Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus, which belong closely together, and which are the chief exponents of this worldly wisdom, moral precepts form the main topics; and though widely different from divine Wisdom, both emanate from the same source, and are ultimately to be traced back to the Giver of all good things. But the particular conception of Wisdom which is of far-reaching importance is that of personification which is attributed to it in the Wisdom Literature. As a general rule Wisdom is spoken of as something abstract; but in some very striking passages it is personified. Before proceeding to illustrate this it is necessary to utter a note of warning against exaggeration in two opposite directions; on the one hand, we are not justified in reading into the words which speak of the personification of Wisdom a meaning which they were not intended to bear; still less, on the other hand, are we justified in explaining away altogether the meaning which those words _were_ intended to bear. When, nowadays, we speak of things, whether abstract or concrete, as personalities the words are used metaphorically without the remotest intention of really imputing personality to the things described; but we must guard against the danger of assuming that our modern way of envisaging things can be paralleled by that of two thousand years ago; the _mode of expression_ may not have greatly changed, but the _way of conceiving_ is totally different. When, among the Jewish sages of old, Wisdom was personified, it was conceived of, according to a modern writer on the subject, as a “projection out of the Divine mind, as something more than an attribute, but as something less than a hypostasis; ‘a little more than kin, and less than kind.’”[310] This is true as far as it goes; but the words of the Jewish sages, as we shall see, lead one to believe that in their conception of Wisdom they went even further than this; one may go so far as to say that