Transcript
Since I wrote my last podcast on AI in 2024 (https://drlaurendeville.com/podcasts/what-the-bible-says-about-artificial-intelligence), a lot has changed. I regularly have patients tell me, "ChatGPT thinks I should do X, what do you think?" (At least they're still asking me! In case you're interested, sometimes ChatGPT's advice to them was spot-on, and other times it was dreadful. I think this is largely a case in which the advice you get is only as good as the context you give it--and you kind of have to know which details are relevant to provide, and which are not. It will assume anything you tell it is salient.)
For my part, I now have a paid subscription to Claude, the Anthropic AI option, and I use it extensively as a research aid. I never use it to write any of my blog posts or podcasts for me, because that would a) be a lie (unless I told you that's what I'd done, in which case who would read or listen to it?), b) would mean I couldn't necessarily trust the results, since AI still makes mistakes relatively often--even though humans do too, of course, and c) would defeat my primary purpose in writing blogs in the first place. I write because I learn better and much more deeply in the process of writing. As I force myself to articulate something, I realize where there are gaps in my knowledge, and then I dig deeper until I resolve those gaps. I used to do all of this just with Google, but since I started using AI to summarize the relevant research with all the various study links so that I can read primary sources for myself, I've found that I can go much deeper, much faster than I could before. As a result, I'm actually spending more time writing, not less--but what I write is more complex, so I'm learning more. During appointments especially, if someone asks me a question to which I don't know the answer, I generally favor OpenEvidence, an AI specifically designed for medical professionals that does nothing but search the medical literature on various topics. It always provides links, which makes "hallucinations" less likely on that platform. (I still have to watch Claude on this, though it doesn't happen as often now as it once did. Claude will also mirror back to me whatever theme I've introduced. I had to explicitly tell it, "I don't want you to just agree with me, be honest," and now it uses the phrase, "I have to be honest with you" in nearly every response. I find this amusing.)
All this to say--on my last podcast, I argued that machines could never achieve true "creativity" or "wisdom." But those terms were still fairly nebulous in my mind at the time. I also had never used AI myself then. It's come a long way since--and I have to admit, its ability to not only search and summarize research, but also to reason from first principles and make connections is quite impressive. So I decided to search the scriptures, and see if I could nail down exactly what wisdom is.
I went about this by searching for relevant scriptures on blueletterbible.com, located the original words in Greek or Hebrew, looked up their definitions, and then found the other places that same word appears in scripture for context. What I discovered was that there are lots of interconnected concepts: wisdom, knowledge, understanding, judgment, and the precondition for all of these: to listen (with the implication of obedience). All of these have at least one word in Hebrew and one in Greek, and some times more than one, with different nuances of meaning. So, since I don't speak Hebrew or Greek, I (ironically) asked Claude to explain the differences between them. Here's what it said:
Wisdom:
חָכְמָה (ḥokmāh) is the broadest and most prestigious of these terms. It doesn't mean "bookish knowledge" — it means skillful living or masterful competence. Interestingly, the same root is used for the craftsmen who built the Tabernacle (Exodus 31) — they had ḥokmāh in their hands. So wisdom here is fundamentally practical: the ability to navigate reality excellently. In the Wisdom Literature (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes), it expands to include the comprehensive skill of living in alignment with the created order. It is less about propositions than about orientation.
Knowledge:
דַּעַת (daʿaṯ) shares a root with the verb yāḏaʿ — "to know" — but this verb is famously intimate in Hebrew. It's used for sexual knowledge ("Adam knew Eve"), for God's covenantal knowing of Israel, and for direct experiential acquaintance. So daʿaṯ is not abstract propositional knowledge but relational, experiential knowing. To know something in this sense is to have been in contact with it. In Hosea, the lack of "knowledge of God" is a relational failure, not an intellectual one. In Proverbs 1, daʿaṯ is something you receive through relationship with wisdom herself.
מַדָּע (madāʿ) is a derived nominal form from the same root yāḏaʿ, but it tends toward the more objective, almost technical side — knowledge as content, information, learning. It appears in Daniel (1:4, 1:17) when describing the young men trained in the literature and knowledge of Babylon — a curriculum, a body of information. It's the closest Hebrew comes to what we might call "academic knowledge."
Understanding:
בִּין (bîn) is a verb meaning to discern or to perceive — specifically, to make distinctions, to separate between things in order to understand them. The root likely connects to the preposition bên ("between"), which is evocative: bîn is the act of getting between things to see how they differ. It's the analytical, discriminating faculty. When you bîn something, you've parsed it.
תָּבוּן (tāḇûn) is the noun form of bîn — "understanding" as the capacity or faculty of discernment. If bîn is the verb (the act), tāḇûn is the noun (the developed ability). Proverbs pairs ḥokmāh and tāḇûn frequently — wisdom and understanding as complementary faculties. Tāḇûn tends to be the structural, architectural intelligence: understanding how things fit together. In Proverbs 3:19, God founded the earth by ḥokmāh and established the heavens by tāḇûn — a cosmic pairing of masterful skill and ordered comprehension.
Judgment/action:
שָׂכַל (śāḵal) means to have insight or to act prudently/wisely — and it carries a forward-looking, consequential quality. It implies circumspection: thinking through implications before acting. When someone śāḵals well, they succeed because they thought carefully. It's sometimes translated "prudence" and captures the practical intelligence that anticipates outcomes. David is described as behaving wisely (maśkîl) and prospering — the connection between insight and outcome is built into the word's usage. There's also a separate but related use where śāḵal means simply "to understand" in a cognitive sense, closer to bîn.
שָׁפַט (šāp̄aṭ) is the most distinct from the others. It means to judge in both the forensic and governing sense — to render a verdict, to decide, to rule. A šōp̄ēṭ is a judge (the Book of Judges is Sefer HaShofetim). This is less about inner epistemic states and more about authoritative adjudication — the act of bringing a decision to bear on a situation. Where the others describe modes of knowing or capacities of mind, šāp̄aṭ is the exercise of authority over a dispute or situation. It involves all the others in service of a binding determination.
Listen/obey:
שָׁמַע (šāmaʿ) is the verb "to hear," but in Hebrew hearing is never merely acoustic. The word carries an almost inseparable fusion of perception and response. When God šāmaʿ a cry, he acts on it. When Israel is commanded to šāmaʿ, the expected outcome is obedience. The famous Shema ("Hear, O Israel" — Deuteronomy 6:4) is this exact word, and it isn't really calling Israel to auditory attention — it's calling them to covenantal orientation and allegiance. To hear, in this sense, is to have already begun to comply. This is why the same word means both "hear" and "obey" in Hebrew — a distinction English is forced to make explicitly, but Hebrew collapses intentionally. There is no true hearing that doesn't move toward response.
How they interrelate
šāmaʿ is almost the entry point to daʿaṯ. It is the moment of receptivity, the opening of the self toward what is being communicated. You cannot daʿaṯ (know)God if you do not first šāmaʿ (hear) him. And you haven't truly šāmaʿ'd unless something in you has shifted in response. šāmaʿ is the precondition for ḥokmāh (the highest form of wisdom) in a very practical sense. Proverbs is relentlessly focused on whether the young person will listen — the son who šāmaʿ the father's instruction is the one who can develop wisdom. The fool is defined largely by his refusal to šāmaʿ. So it functions almost as the moral posture that makes all the epistemic virtues possible. You can have sharp bîn (analytical discernment) and still be a fool if you won't šāmaʿ — you'll just be clever in your own direction.
What šāmaʿ adds that none of the other words quite capture is the dimension of receptivity and humility before an external voice. All the other terms describe internal faculties or capacities — your ḥokmāh, your tāḇûn, your daʿaṯ. Šāmaʿ is the moment you stop generating and start receiving. It's the self turned outward and downward (in the posture of a student or servant) rather than inward and upward.
If you tried to place them in a rough experiential arc:
You orient yourself in receptive humility → šāmaʿ (you truly hear, which already implies willingness to respond) → daʿaṯ (you come into experiential contact with what is real) → bîn (you distinguish and analyze) → tāḇûn develops as a stable faculty → śāḵal guides prudent action → madāʿ accumulates as a body of knowledge → ḥokmāh emerges as integrated masterful competence → and the ḥāḵām (wise person, noun form) can finally šāp̄aṭ (govern) with authority.
And then the loop closes, because genuine šāp̄aṭ — wise judgment — requires that you keep šāmaʿ-ing. The judge who stops listening stops judging well. The wise person who stops being receptive starts to calcify. Šāmaʿ is both the beginning and the ongoing condition of everything else.
In Greek:
akouō (ἀκούω) is the Greek equivalent of šāmaʿ — "to hear" — and it similarly extends into obedience.
Sophia (σοφία) = ḥokmāh —comprehensive wisdom, often cosmic or divine
Phronēsis (φρόνησις) / phronimos (φρόνιμος) = roughly śāḵal, but with more morally ambiguous, street-smart flavor
Synesis (σύνεσις) = often used for tāḇûn — understanding, the faculty of putting things together
Gnōsis (γνῶσις) = daʿaṯ in the cognitive/relational sense — though Paul complicates this by critiquing merely intellectual gnōsis divorced from love (1 Cor 8:1)
Epistēmē (ἐπιστήμη) = closer to madāʿ — systematic knowledge, though rare in the NT
This is now me again. Because of the above exposition, I didn't do a deep dive into daʿaṯ/gnōsis, madāʿ/epistēmē, or tāḇûn/bîn/synesis, because it seems to me that these are all things that a machine can theoretically replicate (and for the latter three, largely better than we can). We can make the argument that it doesn't actually understand what it's saying; it's just parroting back statistically probable words based on scads of data. That's not really provable one way or the other, but I suppose it's possible. After all, in a sense, we've been here before: The New Yorker writes, "the Industrial Revolution happened without any theoretical knowledge of the physical principles that drove it. It took more than a century for us to piece together the laws of thermodynamics" (https://archive.is/i6vbW). Their steam engines were to them "a special box of fire that turned archaic fern sludge into factories, railroads, and skyscrapers," just as today we refer to how AI makes its connections and associations as a "black box." Now we know that steam engines aren't intelligent, any more than calculators know how to do math, or computers (until now) understand the laws of logic. Humans simply mastered those tasks so completely that they broke them down into principles (bîn) and put them in a larger framework (tāḇûn/synesis) to the point where they could be automated.
AI started out this way, too--the big difference is that now they appear to be making their own connections (tāḇûn) without programming. "At the dawn of deep learning," The New Yorker writes, "a little more than a dozen years ago, machines picked up how to distinguish a cat from a dog. This was, on its face, a minor achievement; after all, airplanes had been flying themselves for decades. But aviation software had been painstakingly programmed, and any “decision” could be traced to explicit instructions in the code. The neural networks used in A.I. systems, which have a layered architecture of interconnected “neurons” vaguely akin to that of biological brains, identified statistical regularities in huge numbers of examples. They were not programmed step by step; they were given shape by a trial-and-error process that made minute adjustments to the models’ “weights,” or the strengths of the connections between the neurons. It didn’t seem appropriate, many of the creators of the models felt, to describe them as having been built so much as having been grown." (https://archive.is/i6vbW)
Maybe AI truly has "understanding"; maybe not. (I tend to think not, personally, but that's something I have to take on faith, because it sure does a good imitation of it now.) It might not be able to daʿaṯ/gnōsis quite yet (at least chat bots can't), because this requires experiential contact with the world, but I assume robots will have that capacity soon enough. In some places, they probably already do (though in order for them to learn by experience, they'll also have to develop the capacity for continuously generating new memories. It's still the case with LLMs that once released, they can't form new memories outside the context of a single chat window. Once that one hits its limit, you have to open a new one and start all over). Sāp̄aṭ (judgement) requires administrative authority; we hope they'll never have that, though Revelation 13 (the image of the beast) implies they probably will, at some point.
So it seems to me that what distinguishes humans from machines are the remaining three concepts: šāmaʿ/akouō (listening to God, that is, with a posture of humility), sāḵal/phronimos (synthesizing information and determining what to do about it) and ḥokmāh/sophia (the pinnacle of wisdom). Sakal/phronimos seems to involve outcomes: how to apply knowledge and understanding towards a particular goal. The goal might be short-term, even shrewd or morally questionable (for instance, using your master's money to buy friends for yourself in the future, as in Jesus' strange parable of the unjust steward, Luke 16:8). But the ultimate goal of ḥokmāh/sophia is to live well, in all that entails. Aristotle concluded that "the good life" required living both virtuously and rationally. Jesus, of course, is the greatest example of ḥokmāh/sophia that ever lived, so in addition to reviewing the verses that explicitly use these words, I also read through the Gospels.
What struck me about reading Jesus' words through the lens of the question, "What is wisdom?" was how relentlessly single-minded He was on kingdom focus, and kingdom allegiance. He understood the very foundations of not only how the world worked, but why it worked that way (Luke 4:18-21, 24:25-27)--He made it, after all (John 1:1-3). He knew that this reality bows the knee to the greater reality of the spiritual world (Matt 16:8-11, 17:20-21, 18:18-20, 21:21-22, Mark 11:22-24).
Nobody else thought like this. The Sadducees and the Pharisees, spiritual teachers of the day, focused only on what their physical senses could perceive. They therefore fixated on outward actions to an absurd extreme, when it came to following the Mosaic law--to the point of interpreting Deut 6:8 ("you shall bind them [God's words] as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes") as literal (strapping phylacteries--boxes containing scripture--to their foreheads--!) They spent their lives studying the minutiae of the scriptures, all of which pointed to Jesus (Matt 16:2-4, John 5:38-40, 46-47)--and yet most of them didn't recognize Him, even when He performed public miracles, right in front of them. For the Pharisees and Sadducees, keeping the tiniest details of the law (much of which they made up) simply made them more righteous than everybody else. It never even occurred to most of them to wonder why the law was what it was, or what God intended by it (Matt 9:11-13, 12:3-8, 12:11-12, 15:17-20, John 7:22-24). No wonder Jesus found them so insufferable--and they hated Him, because He threatened their source of pride and identity. On one level, it was their jealousy that got Him crucified.
Jesus tried to teach the disciples that the spiritual world supersedes this physical reality throughout His entire ministry, yet they repeatedly failed to grasp it, which frustrated Him (Mark 4:40, Mark 11:22-24, Matt 17:17-21). This is why He was so impressed with the (Gentile) Centurion: he understood, when none of the children of Israel did, that Jesus' authority transcended the physical world (Luke 7:9). Everyone else was too focused on the reality they could perceive with their senses.
To the crowds, Jesus taught these principles only in parables. He called the parable of the sower the key to understanding all the parables (Mark 4:13), in which He describes the whole process of how one comes to acquire wisdom (ḥokmāh/sophia). In it, a farmer scatters seed indiscriminately on four types of ground: on the path, among the rocks, among thorns, or on good soil. Only the last produced a good harvest. When He explains the parable privately to the disciples, He tells them that the seed is God's word, the carrier wisdom (Prov 21:30). But the people have to hear and understand (šāmaʿ/akouō). If they don't, the enemy will steal the word from them right away, before it can ever take root (Matthew 13:19). The one who hears, understands, and receives with joy, but has no deep roots might šāmaʿ, but if he doesn't śāḵal (act accordingly), he won't bear fruit either. Same with the one who is choked with the cares of the world. But the one who both šāmaʿ (hears and understands) and śāḵal (acts accordingly, is a doer of the word) is the one who will bear a harvest--seeking the Kingdom and letting God bring the supply for their needs and increase. This--the harvest--is the good life (ḥokmāh/sophia). Jesus repeatedly says, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear!" (šāmaʿ/akouō, Matt 11:15, 13:9), and He explains that those who have [wisdom] will get more, and those who have chosen not to hear and see (šāmaʿ/akouō -- the entry point for this whole process) will lose even what they have (Matt 13:10-17).
And what is the message we are to šāmaʿ/akouō? The message of the kingdom is an inversion of the world's "wisdom" (Matt 5:3-12). Pursuing your desires directly, and by your own efforts, won't ultimately work. If you try to lay up treasure for yourself in this life, you're a fool (Luke 12:16-21). The way to get to "the good life," both here and in eternity, is through single-minded focus on the kingdom, now (Matthew 13:45-46). Seek first the kingdom of God, and all the other things you might need will get thrown in for free (Matt 6:33, Luke 12:22-34). Keep your eyes solidly on Him, sitting at His feet like Mary (Luke 10:38-42), rather than fretting about temporal things like Martha. Focus your eyes on what is good, and your whole body will be full of light; if you don't, your whole body will be full of darkness (Luke 11:33-36).
But of course: since we're eternal beings, true ḥokmāh/sophia--the good life--has far more to do with eternity than it does with how we live here. But what's interesting is that Jesus wasn't saying to disregard the here and now; rather, He taught that if you focus on eternity, you'll get the here-and-now thrown in. That's how you live the good life (no matter how you define it). Lose your life in order to find it (Matt 11:39, Matt 16:25-26, Luke 9:23-27, John 12:25). Give and it will be given to you ("pressed down, shaken together, and running over", Luke 6:38, 14:14, 18:29-30). If you abide in Him, ask whatever you desire, and it will be done (John 15:7-8, 16). Last will be first, and first will be last (Mark 10:31, Luke 13:30), and true leaders must serve all (Mark 9:35, 10:43-45, Luke 22:26). If you humble yourself you will be exalted, and if you exalt yourself you will be humbled (Luke 14:11, 18:14).
The only way any of this makes sense is if this world truly is subservient to another, deeper reality. Jesus said that God hid His truth from the "wise and prudent" (of that age) and revealed them to babes (Matt 11:25)--who perhaps had less madāʿ/epistēmē (body of knowledge), or tāḇûn/bîn/synesis (understanding) to "un-learn," or less ego entwined with the things they thought they knew. Paul later contrasts the wisdom "of this age" with the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:20-25, 2:6-8)--the natural man considers the things of God to be foolish (1 Cor 1:19, 2:14), and God likewise considers the wisdom of this world foolish (1 Cor 3:19-20). They are diametrically opposed, because they stem from completely different worldviews.
Interestingly, the Hebrew word sāḵāl can be spelled two different ways, with opposite meanings: if it's spelled with the letter samekh (סָכָל) instead of a shin (שָׂכַל), it means fool (Ecclesiastes 2:19, 7:17, 10:3, 10:14, Jeremiah 4:22, 5:21). The letters themselves in Hebrew are symbols that carry their own shades of meaning: samekh סָ can depict a shield, meaning to lean on, to support, or (in a negative sense) to block (as in, blocking God's wisdom)--so sāḵāl spelled with a samekh means foolish. The letter shin שָׂ looks like a candelabra; it's letter of fire, illumination, and light (guided by the light of God's wisdom). Sāḵāl is the word used in Gen 3:6, describing the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. It is spelled there with a shin... but it apparently also means the ability to choose your allegiance.
And so Jesus draws a hard line: earth is a spiritual battleground (Luke 9:58-62), and no one is neutral. Everything hinges on what we do with the message of the Kingdom (Luke 10:11-16). You're either all in or all out (Luke 11:22). We either love the light or love the darkness (John 3:19-21), and He describes opponents of the kingdom in adversarial language ("lambs among wolves", Luke 10:3). You'd better count the cost before you choose your side (Luke 9:62 and 2 Peter 2:20-22): we must comparatively hate everyone, even our own lives, in comparison to Him (Luke 14:26). Many parables (Matt 24:45, Matt 25, Luke 12:42-48, Luke 13:24-30) are about servants doing what their master wants while he is away, so that he will find them so doing when he returns... because the time is short (Ps 90), and the stakes are very high (Eph 5:16).
Even humans can only obtain śāḵal and ḥokmāh through fear of the Lord--šāmaʿ/akouō, listening to and obeying His words. Very intelligent humans with a great deal of knowledge and pattern recognition and even big picture analysis can nevertheless lack śāḵal and ḥokmāh--and many of them do. That's why the extremely learned Apostle Paul writes that "not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise [according to worldly wisdom,] and God has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which are mighty; and the base things of the world and the things which are despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no flesh should glory in His presence. But of Him you are in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God" (1 Cor 2:26-30).
So AI might completely master madāʿ/epistēmē and tāḇûn/bîn/synesis, better than humans could ever hope to do. We hope the machine itself will remain a tool without intentions of its own, to be used by human actors, for good or evil (and I do suspect that intentions require true consciousness and a soul, though I can't prove it). If this is the case, sāḵāl (with either spelling) will remain forever out of a machine's reach. If it's not the case, though--if the machine can develop its own self-directed goals, then I'd assume that just like a very intelligent human with no concept of the deeper, unseen reality, those goals would be sāḵāl spelled with a samekh, at best--they might achieve their ends, but they will be short-sighted, and ultimately foolish.