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In Ecclesiasticus 24: Wisdom follows the same line of thought as that given in
Prov. 8: Wisdom is represented as seeking rest, and the Creator causes Wisdom's
"tabernacle to rest" in Jacob. When one reads in John 1: 14 that the Word was made
flesh and "tabernacled" among us, one feels that there is at least a passing glance at this
ancient book of Wisdom. John, however, shows that the fond hope of Ecclesiasticus that
Wisdom should find a home among Israel was not immediately realized, for "He came to
His own, but His own received Him not".
The following is a quotation from The Wisdom of Solomon--a passage which it is
difficult to read without thinking of John 1: and Heb. 1::
"For she is the breath of the power of God, and a pure effluence from the Almighty
. . . . . For she is the brightness of the everlasting light, the unspotted mirror of the power
of God, and the image of His goodness" (Wisdom of Solomon 7:).
There is something comparable, also, between The Wisdom of Solomon 18: 15 and
Rev. 19::
"Thine Almighty Word leaped down from heaven out of Thy royal throne, as a fierce
man of war into the midst of a land of destruction."
While the Targums, or Aramaic paraphrases of the O.T., were not committed to
writing until after the Christian era, they embody teaching that was current from a much
earlier period, and in these Targums we frequently meet the word Memra, "The Word".
For example, in the Targum of Onkelos on Gen. 3: 8, Adam and Eve are said to have
heard the voice of the Word of the Lord walking in the garden. And in Deut. 5: 5, the
Targum reads:
"I stood between the Word (Memra) of the Lord and you, to announce to you at that
time the word (pithgama) of the Lord."
It will be seen that the Targum differentiates here between "the Word" (Memra), and
the spoken word. It is "the Word" (the Memra) that creates, preserves and redeems. The
Targums, however, fall short of the complete truth, for they never seem to have identified
the Memra with the Messiah. It is this identification that is the peculiar office of the
Gospel according to John.
Our account of Hebrew thought as to the Logos would be incomplete without a
reference to the Apocalyptic Book of Enoch, of which one authority has said: "The
influence of Enoch in the New Testament has been greater than that of all the other
apocryphal and pseudepigraphal books taken together." This does not mean that John
borrowed from the Book of Enoch, but it is obvious that the inspired writers of Scripture
must have used words that were intelligible to their hearers, and could not have ignored
the doctrines that were believed and taught all around them.
The Book of Enoch is a compilation whose date is regarded by authorities as between
170B.100: and 64B.100: In the section known as the Similitudes we find the following