How can Wisdom be Jesus if Wisdom was created? Proverbs 8:22 (KJV) The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old.


Even if you take the stance that Proverbs 8:22 means God possessed me at the beginning (i.e. as opposed to God created me at the beginning), what does one do with, for example, Sirach 1:4, which says:


  Sirach 1:4 (KJV) Wisdom hath been created before all things, and the understanding of prudence from everlasting.


I'd like to believe that Wisdom is Jesus; it makes a lot of sense to me. But it's very hard for me to believe Jesus was a created being, and just as hard to believe there are two Wisdoms.

Question

According to Christians who believe a) Christ was not created and b) is the Wisdom spoken of in the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, why is this Wisdom described in the Old Testament as having been created by God?
I actually read an article recently that mentions in passing this concept (that Wisdom is Jesus.)

The article first speaks of the Greek Concept of Logos and mentions,


  “Beginning at least as early as the apologist Justin Martyr (A.D. 125), Christians, almost without exception, identified Sophia (the Greek equivalent of Heb. ḥoḵmâ) in Proverbs 8 with Jesus Christ.”[17]


...


  In these verses the quality of wisdom is personified. As the gender of wisdom [in Hebrew: ח֗כְמַה: ḥoḵmah] is feminine, some claim that the agent I question is a feminine being. However, it should be remembered that there is a difference between sex and gender. This is also the case in other Semitic languages that Hebrew. For instance, the Arabic word for Caliph (خليفة: ḵalīfe) is a word in the feminine gender although it always refers to a male.[16]


https://antiochene.wordpress.com/2014/07/31/logos-and-memra/

Question
According to Christians who believe a) Christ was not created and b) is the Wisdom spoken of in the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, why is this Wisdom described in the Old Testament as having been created by God?

There are a number of different potential reasons for this:

1) Theological Development.   The bible is a work of revelation and theological development.   If you look in the Bible certain concepts like God's omnipresence, the afterlife are not understood in ancient times the way we understand them.   So I would contend that the same is true in regards to Nicene concepts of the persons of the Trinity etc.

2) The Limited Vocabulary of Hebrew.   Ancient Hebrew is a language with a very limited vocabulary.   I have to look up some official stats, but I recall that it has only a few thousand words compared to simple European languages that have 10,000 word Lexicons which in turn are only a fraction of the Lexican of modern English.   What this means practically speaking is that words are going to have to serve double duty, have multiple meanings and be less definite than a language like Greek.    But overall, I really believe the theological development reason is the best explanation.

But I will add a third one from the aforementioned article.   


  The parallel to logos the Aramaic speaking Jews after the captivity in Babylon used the word memra. This concept was at times personified and used on a sort of representative of God. As we have seen above, “In Psalms 110 Jehovah addresses the first verse to the Memra.”[43]
  
  Consequently, when John uses the word logos on Jesus, it is either to say that this person, who was active at the creation the world, visible as well as invisible, is the embodiment of earlier prophecies and promises, or, even more likely, that he was called logos because he was the spokesman or representative of God.
  
  It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if second and third century Christians had based their interpretation of John 1:1, not on the connotations of the Word in Greek philosophy, but on those of the Word in Jewish Aramaic tradition.