The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

‘Wisdom’, the personified breath and word of YHWH, the one created ‘in the beginning’ before all else, and the one through whom, in other closely related passages, all creation was made148—this Wisdom is now to be identified with two other personifications, namely the Shekinah and the Torah. Shekinah is the ‘tabernacling’ presence of YHWH in the Temple of Jerusalem. Torah, of course, is the law given to Moses. When we come back to the Johannine prologue with this passage in mind, the echoes run all through. There is a logos, a ‘word’, present with the creator from the beginning as his self-expression. This logos comes to make its tabernacle with us: the phrase ‘and dwelt among us’ in John 1:14 is in Greek kai eskenosen en hemin, which echoes the language of Sirach 24:8, 10, with skene being both the Greek for ‘tent’ or ‘tabernacle’ and also, interestingly, an apparent cognate of the Hebrew Shekinah itself. The result is that ‘we have beheld his glory’, the glory of the truly human being, who, like Wisdom in another Jewish book, is the ‘unique’ one, monogenes.149