he 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