Aristobulus—­assuming the genuineness of his Fragments—­wrote:[198] “We must understand the Word of God, not as a spoken word, but as the establishment of actual things, seeing that we find throughout the Torah that Moses has declared the whole creation to be words of God.”  Philo, following his predecessor, says, “God speaks not words but things,"[199] and, again, commenting on the first chapter of Genesis, “God, even as He spake, at the same moment created."[200] And of human speech he has this pretty conceit a little before:  “Into the mouth there enter food and drink, the perishable food of a perishable body; out of it issue words, immortal laws of an immortal soul, by which rational life is guided."[201] If human speech is “immortal law,” much more is the speech of God.  His words are ideas seen by the eye of the soul, not heard by the ear.[202] The ten commandments given at Sinai were “ideas” of this incorporeal nature, and the voice that Israel heard was no voice such as men possess, but the [Hebrew:  shkina], the Divine Presence itself, which exalted the multitude.[203] Philo is here expanding and developing Jewish tradition.  In the “Ethics of the Fathers” (v) we read:  “By ten words was the world created”; and in the pages of the Midrash the [Hebrew:  bt-kol], i.e._, the mystic emanation of the Deity, which revealed itself after the spirit of prophecy had ceased to be vouchsafed, is credited with wondrous and varied powers, now revealing the Decalogue, now performing some miracle, now appearing in a vision to the blessed, now prophesying the future fate of the race to a pious rabbi.  The fertilizing stream of Greek philosophical idealism nourished the growth of the Jewish pious imagination, and in the Logos of Philo the fruit matured.  It is idle to try to formulate a single definite notion of Philo’s Logos.  For it is the expression of God in all His multiple and manifold activity, the instrument of creation, the seat of ideas, the world of thought which God first established as the model of the visible universe, the guiding providence, the sower of virtue, the fount of wisdom, described sometimes in religious ecstasy, sometimes in philosophical metaphysics, sometimes in the spirit of the mystical poet.  Of his last manner let us take a specimen singled out by a Christian and a Jewish theologian as of surprising beauty.  Commenting on the verse of the Psalmist, “The river of God is filled with water,” Philo declares that it is absurd to call any earthly stream the river of God.

“The poet clearly refers to the Divine Logos that is full of the fountain of wisdom, and is in no part itself empty.  Nay, it is diffused through the universe, and is raised up on high.  In another verse the Psalmist says, ’The course of the river gladdens the city of God.’  And in truth the continuous rush of the Divine Logos is borne along with eager but regular onset, and overflows and gladdens all things.  In one sense he calls the world