174 A History of Judaism
artist impressing the stampings upon the material substances required in
each case.Plato’s Timaeus was often called in by Philo to illustrate the veracity of
Moses’ insights, which did not mean that Plato alone had seen the truth,
for Philo also drew on Stoic arguments in his discussion of providence,
and his fascination with arithmology was adopted from Neopythagor-
eans as in his discussion of the Ten Commandments:
Our admiration is at once aroused by their number, which is neither more
nor less than is the supremely perfect, Ten. Ten contains all different kinds
of numbers, even as 2, odd as 3, and even– odd as 6, and all ratios, whether
of a number to its multiples or fractional, when a number is either increased
or diminished by some part of itself.^23
In keeping with his Platonic bent, Philo separated the world into two
realms. Only in the upper, intelligible realm can truth be found, and the
aim of life must be to lift up the soul to ‘see God’, although God is
sometimes described by him as inhabiting a sphere above even the world
of ideas, and thus ‘ineffable, inconceivable and incomprehensible’. This
extreme transcendentalism led Philo to the somewhat contradictory
assertions that, although God is the only object worth knowing, he is
without quality and therefore unknowable.^24
Philo frequently stressed the unity of God, identifying the divine
name as pronounced to Moses in Exodus with the Form of Forms as
defined by Plato. How could a God so exalted have any relation to the
bodily world of ‘opinion’ in which humans live, without compromising
the perfection of the divine? The problem was not unique to Philo,
hence the plethora of divine intermediaries presupposed in other Jewish
writings of the late Second Temple period. But Philo’s solution, which
was central to his thought, was distinctive and powerful. Many Greek
philosophers had discussed the role in human life of logos, meaning
‘speech’ or ‘rational order’, and logos is found in Wisdom of Solomon
as the agent of God: ‘it was your word [logos ], O Lord, that heals all
people’. For Philo, the Logos is the chief power of God which brings
God to man and man to God. The notion was not wholly consistent.
The Logos is a copy of God, and human intelligence is a copy of the
Logos. There are two Logoi:
One is the archetypal reason above us, the other the copy of it which we
possess. Moses calls the first the ‘image of God’, the second the cast of that
image. For God, he says, made man not ‘the image of God’ but ‘after the