Proverbs 9:1
Proverbs 9:11Wisdom has built her house; she has carved out her seven pillars.
JWs cite Proverbs 9 (and the wider Wisdom-personification passages of Proverbs 1-9) as the proof that biblical authors freely personify abstract qualities — and therefore that the Holy Spirit's first-person speech in ("set apart for me Barnabas and Saul... whom I have called") can be read as the same kind of literary device. The Watchtower argument is structural: if Wisdom can speak, build a house, and call from the streets without being a person, the Spirit can do the same.
The Hebrew chokmot has built her house and hewn out her seven pillars — feminine personification of Wisdom in classic Hebrew poetry. The chapter belongs to Proverbs 1-9, the wisdom-poetry block where personification operates by the rules of the genre: parallelism, sustained metaphor, an extended figure that no reader mistakes for biography. The JW personification rebuttal works against itself when read carefully: it confirms exactly what the Spirit-personhood argument needs. Personification belongs to poetry. Acts 13 is historical narrative (named men, named city, named tetrarch, named sea voyage). The presence of personification in Proverbs 9 does not license its smuggling into Luke's travel log.
The NWT renders chokmot as "true wisdom" and uses the neuter pronoun "its" — "True wisdom has built its house; it has carved out its seven pillars." Standard translations preserve the feminine personification: "Wisdom has built her house; she has hewn her seven pillars" (ESV, NASB, NIV). The shift quietly weakens the personification the chapter is built around — and weakens, with it, the Wisdom-Christ connection that early Christian readers (drawing on 1 Cor 1:24, 30) saw in the figure. The flatter NWT rendering matches the Watchtower's broader hermeneutical move: personification is reduced to figure of speech rather than carried as a serious feature of the text.