How many times does the Bible mention wisdom?

The count

• KJV, BSB, NIV: “wisdom” appears approximately 220 to 240 times.
• Old Testament: about 180 occurrences.
• New Testament: about 50 occurrences.

The Hebrew vocabulary

• chokmah (חָכְמָה, “wisdom, skill, expertise”): about 152 occurrences.
• chakam (חָכָם, “wise person”): about 137 occurrences as a noun or adjective.

Hebrew chokmah covers a wider semantic range than English “wisdom.” It includes:

• Practical skill — Bezalel is filled with chokmah to craft the tabernacle (Exodus 31:3).
• Political and administrative shrewdness — Solomon’s chokmah in governance and judgment (1 Kings 3).
• Moral and theological discernment — the standard usage in Proverbs and the wisdom literature.

The conventional translation “wisdom” captures the moral-theological dimension but underplays the practical-skill dimension.

The Greek vocabulary

• sophia (σοφία, “wisdom”): about 51 occurrences in the NT.
• sophos (σοφός, “wise”): about 20 occurrences.

Greek sophia in the NT covers the same range as Hebrew chokmah: practical skill, moral wisdom, and divine wisdom. The Pauline use of sophia in 1 Corinthians 1–2 contrasts “the wisdom of this world” with “the wisdom of God revealed in the cross” — a deliberate inversion of conventional Greek wisdom-discourse.

The wisdom literature

The Hebrew Bible has a recognised genre of “wisdom literature” — books that focus on practical and theological wisdom:

• Proverbs: the paradigm wisdom book; collections of sayings, organised around the figure of wisdom personified (Proverbs 8).
• Job: a wisdom poem confronting the limits of conventional wisdom about suffering and justice.
• Ecclesiastes: a sceptical wisdom book that interrogates wisdom’s own claims.
• Song of Songs: sometimes classed as wisdom literature, sometimes not.
• Psalms 1, 19, 37, 49, 73, 112, 119, 127, 128, 133: “wisdom psalms.”

The deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach extend the genre in Greek and Hebrew.

Wisdom personified

In Proverbs 8 and Wisdom of Solomon 7, “Wisdom” appears as a personified figure — a feminine voice that calls to humanity and was present with God at creation. The Christian tradition has often connected this personified Wisdom with the eternal Word (Logos) of John 1, identified with Christ. The connection is interpretive rather than explicit in the OT itself.