exegesis and his habit of spiritualizing the material.  It is related in Exodus (xvi. 15) that when the Israelites saw the heavenly food they exclaimed [Hebrew:  mn hu’], “What is it?” and hence the food obtained its name of manna.  Now the Greek Septuagint word for [Hebrew:  mn] is [Greek:  ti], which means not only “what” but “anything.”  Philo sees in the gift of the heavenly food a symbol of the inspiration of the chosen people by the Divine Logos, and says that the Logos is rightly called manna, i.e., anything, because it is the “most generic of all things, and that by which man may be nourished."[215]

The central thought of Philo’s system is that God is immanent in all His work; but it would seem to him sacrilegious to apply to the Godhead itself this universal, unceasing activity, and so he develops the Logos as the most ideal attribute of the Deity, and the sum of all His immanence and effluence.  He preferred the Logos to the older Wisdom, probably because he could by this conception bring his idea of God into closer relation with Greek philosophical notions, for already the Hellenistic world had come spontaneously to revere the cosmical Logos.  Only Philo gave to the expression of their physical and metaphysical speculation a religious warmth new to it, when he associated it with the word uttered by the personal God.  Philosophy, theology, and religion were all joined and harmonized in his conception.

If we have followed thus far the spirit of Philo aright, the Logos is only the immanent manifestation of the One God, who is both transcendental and immanent, metaphorically, not metaphysically, separate.  In other words, it is the complete aspect of God as He reveals Himself to the world.  Above it and including it is the being or essence of God, seen in Himself, and not in relation to His outward activity.  But it is often suggested that the Logos appears to Philo as a second God, subordinate, indeed, to the Supreme Being, but yet a separate personality.  It is said, with truth, that he speaks of it as a person, now calling it king, priest, primal man, the first-born son of God, even the second God, and identifying it at other times with some personal being, Melchizedek or Moses, and apostrophizing it as man’s helper, guide, and advocate.[216] Now we have reason to think that Gnostic sects of Jews, both in Alexandria and in Palestine, were at this time tending towards the division of the Godhead into separate powers.  The heresy of “Minut,” frequently mentioned in the Talmud, consisted originally, in the opinion of modern scholars, of a Gnostic ditheism;[217] and during the latter part of the first century and thereafter we hear of sects in Egypt and Syria which supported similar theories.  Theology here produced its fantastic offspring theosophy, and the followers of the esoteric wisdom let their speculations carry them away from the cardinal principle of Judaism.  Influenced by Egyptian speculation, they imagined an incarnation of the Divine Spirit, and in the mystical thought of the day they adumbrated theories of virgin birth.