ch 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." In Ecclesiasticus it is written, "All Wisdom is
from t