The teachers at Alexandria were above all others induced to develop the Word into the active power, since they seemed thereby to find in the Bible a remarkable anticipation of Greek philosophy.  The Greek Logos, by which “the Word” was translated in the Septuagint, meant also thought and reason, and during the Hellenistic age was the regular term by which the philosophical schools expressed the impersonal world-force which governed all things.  The Logos idea among the Jews was a modification of intuitive and naive monotheism; among the Greeks it was a step upwards, demanded by reason, from polytheism to a monistic view of the universe.  By the first century its recognition as the ruling power in both the physical and moral universe had become a point of union in all philosophical schools—­the common stamp of philosophical theology.  Between the Semitic ministerial word uttered by a personal Being and the Greek pantheistic governing reason, there was probably an early connection, due to Eastern influences which operated upon the founders of Greek philosophy, which later schools lost sight of.  When the Hebrew Scriptures were translated, the two coalesced more fruitfully in the Greek term Logos, and a point of union was provided between the philosophical and the Jewish theology.  Moreover the local Egyptian influence aided the union, for the god Thoth was also identified with the Logos, which thus appeared as a religious conception common to all races, the basis of a universal creed.  And besides the world-reason of the philosophers, another Greek influence no doubt tended to further the development of the Logos in Jewish thought.  One of the most marked characteristics of the Hellenistic age is the renascence of wonder at the institutions of human life, and more especially at numbers and speech.

Numbers were held to contain the essence of things, and the marvellous powers of four, seven, and ten received honor from all sects and schools.  Words, too, were regarded almost as a mystic power, distinct from thought, incorporeal things which made thought real and gave it expression.  The mystical susceptibility of Philo to the power of numbers has been noticed by every critic and exaggerated by not a few; his mystical valuation of words and speech, though far more important in his thought, has been commonly passed over.  The analysis which Greek writers made of the relation between the mental thought, the sound which utters it, and the mind which thinks it, was invested with special importance for the Jewish thinker, who transferred it from the human to the Divine sphere.  He applied it to interpret the constant Biblical phrases “and God said” or “and God spoke,” according to notions in which philosophy and theology are mixed; and propounded a mystic idealism and a mystic cosmology, in which God’s thought or comprehensive Word becomes the archetype of the visible universe, His single words the substantive universe and the laws of nature.  A century before Philo,