In Ecclesiasticus it is written, “All Wisdom is from the Lord and is with Him forever.  She cometh forth from the mouth of the Most High, and was created before all things.  God having fashioned her from the beginning placed her over all His works.  Then she covered the earth as a mist, she pitched her tent in high places and her palace was in a pillar of cloud.  She ministered in the tabernacle, and was established in Zion, in Jerusalem, the beloved city.”  In similar strain, in the apocalyptic book of Enoch (xxx), God says, “On the sixth day I ordered My Wisdom to make man”; and in the Sibylline Oracles and Aristobulus she appears as the assessor of God who ruleth over men.

Parallel with Wisdom, the Word of God was developed into something between a poetical image and a separate power.  Again the development starts from a Biblical metaphor.  “By the word of the Lord were the heavens created, and all their host by the breath of His mouth” (Ps. xxxiii).  “God of our Fathers and Lord of Mercy, who didst make all things by Thy word,” says the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon.  Inspired again by the phrase of the Psalmist, “He sent His word, and healed them” (Ps. cvi. 20), he hymns the Divine Logos as the all-powerful emissary doing God’s bidding among men.  “It was neither herb nor emollient that cured Israel in the wilderness (when bitten by the fiery scorpions), but Thy Logos, O Lord, which heals all things.”  Later, when he describes the destruction of the first-born in Egypt, he rises in a paean to a finer poetical flight:  “When tranquil silence folded all things, and night in her own swiftness was in the midst of her course, Thy all-powerful Logos leaped from heaven, from his royal throne, a stern warrior into the midst of the doomed land, bearing as a sharp sword Thy Divine commandment, and having taken his stand filled all things with death:  and he touched heaven and walked upon earth.”  The Jewish poet, rejecting the idea that the perfect God could descend to earth and slay men, brushes away the anthropomorphism of the Bible, and summons from his mind this creation mixed of Hebrew imagination and Greek reason.  So, too, Onkelos, wherever activity upon earth was ascribed to God, wrote, in his translation (Targum) of Scripture, “the word of the Lord,” and for the material hand he substituted the more abstract might.  The same development,[197] under the names of Memra and (less frequently) of [Hebrew:  dbor], shows that the word-agent of God appealed to certain of the rabbis in their desire to explain away, on the one hand, expressions in the Bible which seemed to invest the Deity with corporeal qualities, and, on the other, so to divide His infinite perfection as to make His presence immanent upon earth.