The House that Wisdom Built - for Her
Prv. 14:1
She built the home but is not a homemaker. Riddle? Just another puzzling piece of Proverbs.
The Hebrew grammar is confusing but what emerges from the opening verse of chapter 14 of Proverbs is yet another reminder of the missing, hidden layers of the power of the feminine divine as a force that constructs reality and can choose to create or destroy the foundations of our lives.
Her veiled presence is at the heart of ‘The Great Mother’, an epic volume published in 1955 by the Jungian analysis and scholar Eric Neumann:
“In the patriarchal development of the Judeo-Christian West, with its masculine, monotheistic trend toward abstraction, the goddess, as a feminine figure of wisdom, was disenthroned and repressed. She survived only secretly, for the most part on heretical and revolutionary bypaths.”
Here is how she shows up - representing both sides of the archetype - wisdom and folly, light and shadow, builder and destroyer of worlds:
חַכְמ֣וֹת נָ֭שִׁים בָּנְתָ֣ה בֵיתָ֑הּ וְ֝אִוֶּ֗לֶת בְּיָדֶ֥יהָ תֶהֶרְסֶֽנּוּ׃
The wisest of women builds her house,
But folly tears it down with its own hands.
Prv. 14:1
Anne Gordon unpacks some of the grammar issues here:
“This chapter opens with a conundrum of language. 14:1 is a challenge to translate because the first two words, the subject of the verse, are plural, and the last two words of this half of the verse are singular. Thus, a rough approximation is: “the wisdoms of women built her house.” Alternatively, it can be translated formally: “the wisest of women builds her house” or even: “Every wise woman builds her house.”
So who is this wisest of women and what house are we talking about?
The myth-makers who wrote the Midrashic collection on Proverbs had a creative suggestion: The woman is the mother of Moses, Yoheved, mentioned briefly in the Book of Exodus, who not only birthed the savior of the people, hid him and made sure he survive, but also was the mother of two other prophetic leaders: Miriam and Aaron.
The three siblings served the nation with their own gifts of leadership and prophecy. The Mythical oral tradition considers Yoheved to be one of the two courageous midwives who resisted Pharaonic decrees and made sure the Hebrew women were able to give birth to their babies.
As a reward they received ‘houses’ - which is not quite explained. According to this Midrashic spin - it is the national future, held by these three leaders, that is ‘the houses’ as reward and symbol of a solid future. Yoheved is the wise woman who invests in the people’s future, as a mother who nurtures children and the prophetic vision of survival.
Who then is the other woman - the folly who dismantles the house with her own hands?
She is what the Jungians, like Neumann, call the Shadow side of life - the repressed parts of our psyche and the so-called darker aspects of our personality and the collective consciousness. If Yoheved is the mother who makes sure life continues - the other side of that narrative is the drive to destroy, dismantle dignity and devote energy to death - not to life. How are these forces at play in our personal and public lives, right now?
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