by His wisdom, and hath stretched out the heavens by His
understanding ... the Lord God is the true God."(432) With this
declaration of war against heathenism, the prophet drew the line, once for
all, between the uncreated, transcendent God and the created, perishable
universe. It is true that Plato spoke of primordial and eternal matter and
Aristotle of an eternally rotating celestial sphere, and that even
Biblical exegetes, such as Ibn Ezra,(433) inferred from the Creation story
the existence of primeval chaotic matter. Yet, on the whole, the Jewish
idea of God has demanded the assumption that even this primitive matter
was created by God, or, as most thinkers have phrased it, that God created
the world _out of nothing_. This doctrine was voiced as early as the
Maccabean period in the appeal made by the heroic mother to the youngest
of her seven sons.(434) In the same spirit R. Gamaliel II scornfully
rejects the suggestion of a heretic that God used primeval substances
already extant in creating the world.(435)

2. Of course, thinking people will ever be confronted by the problem how a
transcendental God could call into existence a world of matter, creating
it within the limits of space and time, without Himself becoming involved
in the process. It would seem that He must by the very act subject Himself
to the limitations and mutations of the universe. Hence some of the
ancient Jewish teachers came under the influence of Babylonian and
Egyptian cosmogonies in their later Hellenistic forms, and resorted to the
theory of intermediary forces. Some of these adopted the Pythagorean
conception of the mysterious power of letters and numbers, which they
communicated to the initiated as secret lore, with the result that the
suspicion of heresy rested largely upon "those who knew," the so-called
Gnostics.

The difficulty of assuming a creation at a fixed period of time was met in
many different ways. It is interesting to note that R. Abbahu of Caesarea
in the fourth century offered the explanation: "God caused one world after
another to enter into existence, until He produced the one of which He
said: 'Behold, this is good.' "(436) Still this opinion seems to have been
expressed by even earlier sages, as it is adopted by Origen, a Church
father of the third century, who admitted his great debt to Jewish
teachers.(437)

The medieval Jewish philosophers evaded the difficulty by the Aristotelian
expedient of connecting the conc