relations produced in Palestine the doctrine of angels, in Alexandria the doctrine of Wisdom and the Logos.  At the same time the Wisdom and the Word were not unknown to the Palestinian Midrash, and the hierarchies of angels to the Alexandrian, for the suggestion of the different subordinate powers had been evolved before the two traditions had become independent.  The doctrine of angels never indeed won recognition from the rabbis, but it was for centuries an element of popular belief.

More philosophical than the doctrine of angels was the conception of different attributes of God [Hebrew:  mdot], which were different manifestations of His activity, to the human mind separable and distinguishable from each other, though absolutely they were inseparable aspects of the Godhead.  Chief among these were the attribute of mercy and the attribute of justice, [Hebrew:  mdt hrhmim] and [Hebrew:  mdt hdin],[195] by which, according to a Midrash, Adam was driven from Eden.  And these conceptions, though distrusted by the Synagogue, entered into later parts of the Prayer Book.  “Attribute of Mercy, reveal thyself for us; make our supplication to fall at the feet of Thy Creator; and on behalf of Thy people beseech for mercy”; thus runs a fine prayer in the Ne’ilah service of the Day of Atonement, and many of the other Selihot prove the persistence of this development of Jewish belief.  The theory of Divine attributes was common to Palestine and Alexandria, and plays, as we shall see, an important part in Philo’s[196] thought; but the distinctive Hellenistic theology is the hypostasis of the Wisdom and the Word of God.  In the Bible itself, and notably in Proverbs, we find Wisdom personified—­the first vague, poetical suggestion of a Jewish theology.  As the Jews came into contact with Hellenic influence, the tendency to develop the personification into a power increased, and may be traced through the first flower of Graeco-Jewish culture, the Wisdom literature.  The Greek philosophers had conceived the First Cause as a ruling Mind, or universal Reason, and influenced by this conception, yet loyal to their monotheistic faith, the Jewish writers of the Hellenistic age spoke of the Wisdom as the minister of God, the power by which He ruled creation.  The apocryphal books of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon exhibit Wisdom passing from the poetical personification of the Bible to the separate hypostasis of theology.  In the verse of the Bible sage, “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars” (Prov. ix. 1), she is the creation of the purely poetical fancy, but in the Wisdom of Solomon she has become a link between Heaven and earth, the creation of the theologian’s reflection.  “She reacheth from one end of the world to the other with strength, and ordereth all things graciously.  She is settled by God on His throne, and by her He made the world, by her the righteous were saved.  She watched over the father of the human race, and she delivered Israel from Egypt.”