l God be the founder of
the material universe? How can the infinite mind be present in the
finite thought of man? How can the all-good Power be the creator of
the evil which we see in the material world and of the wickedness that
flourisheth among men? These questions presented themselves to the
Israelite after he had consummated his marvellous religious intuition,
and became the starting-point of a theology which is nascent in the
Wisdom literature of the Bible. Theology is the reasoning about God
which follows always in the footsteps of religious certitude. First,
man by his intuitive reason rises to some idea of the Godhead
satisfying to his emotion; next, by his discursive reason, he
endeavors to justify that idea to his experience in analyzing God's
operations. Renan, disposing sweepingly of a great question, declares
that the Jewish monotheism excluded any true theology. But, in fact,
in Palestine, and still more in Alexandria from the third century
B.C.E., Jewish thought had as one of its constant aims to develop a
theory of the operations of the one God in the world of material
plurality. When the Jews came in contact with the cosmological
mythology of Babylon, their God seemed to soar beyond the reach of
men, and they looked to powers nearer them to bridge the widening
gulf. To some extent this aim engendered a modification in the
religious monotheism, and led to the interposition of intermediate
conceptions between the Inconceivable and man. "The whole angelology,"
says Deutsch,[194] "so strikingly simple before the Captivity and so
wonderfully complex after it, owes its quick development in Babylonian
soil to some awe-stricken desire which grows with growing culture,
removing the inconceivable Being further and further from human touch
or knowledge." Speaking generally, it may be said that reflection
about God's relations produced in Palestine the doctrine of angels, in
Alexandria the doctrine of Wisdom and the Logos. At the same time the
Wisdom and the Word were not unknown to the Palestinian Midrash, and
the hierarchies of angels to the Alexandrian, for the suggestion of
the different subordinate powers had been evolved before the two
traditions had become independent. The doctrine of angels never indeed
won recognition from the rabbis, but it was for centuries an element
of popular belief.

More philosophical than the doctrine of angels was the conception of
different attributes of God [Hebrew: mdot], whi