2. Just as the references to God’s appearing to man suggested luminous powers mediating the vision of God, so the passages which represent God as speaking suggest powers mediating the voice. Hence arose the conception of the divine _Word_, invested with divine powers both physical and spiritual. The first act of God in the Bible is that He spoke, and by this word the world came into being. The _Word_ was thus conceived of as the first created being, an intermediary power between the Spirit of the world and the created world order. The word of God, important in the cosmic order, is still more so in the moral and spiritual worlds. The Word is at times a synonym of divine revelation to the men of the early generations or to Israel, the bearer of the Law. Hence the older Haggadah places beside the _Shekinah_ the divine _Word_ (Hebrew, _Maamar_; Aramaic, _Memra_; Greek, _Logos_) as the intermediary force of revelation. Contact with the Platonic and Stoic philosophies led gradually to a new development which appears in Philo. The Word or Logos becomes “the first-created Son of God,” having a personality independent from God; in fact he is a kind of vice regent of God himself. From this it was but a short step toward considering him a partner and peer of the Almighty, as was done by the Church with its doctrine that the Word became flesh in Christ, the son of God.(595) In view of this the rabbinical schools gave up the idea of the personified Word, replacing it with the _Torah_ or the _Spirit of God_. The older term was retained only in liturgical formulas, such as: “Who created the heavens by His Word,” or, “Who by His Word created the twilight and by Wisdom openeth the gates of heaven.”(596) 3. As has been shown above,(597) Wisdom is described in the Bible as the first of all created beings, the assistant and counselor of God in the work of creation. Then we see that Ben Sira identifies Wisdom with the Torah.(598) Thus the Torah, too, was raised to a cosmic power, the sum and substance of all wisdom. In fact, the Torah, like the Logos of Plato, was regarded as comprising the ideas or prototypes of all things as in a universal plan. The Torah is the divine pattern for the world. In such a connection _Torah_ is far from meaning the Law, as Weber asserts.(599) It means rather the heavenly book of instruction which contains all the wisdom of the ages, and which God himself used as guide at the Creation. God is depicted as an architect with His plan drafted before He began the erection of the edifice,—a conception which avoids all danger of deifying the Logos.