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, 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