[18] As, _e.g._ when they give the name of Lot's wife, which was Idith (Tanḥ. i. 45^b), or are able to say that the fare which Jonah paid to go in the ship was 4000 gold pieces (b. Nedar. 38ª), or that Noah took with him into the ark suitable food for the different creatures:--hay for the camel, barley for the ass, grape-vines for the elephant, and _glass_ for the ostrich (Tanḥ. 15ª). It will be of more use to take some of the points of the foregoing sketch of Pharisaic belief, and examine them in greater detail. And the first shall be the doctrine of God, and more particularly certain aspects of the doctrine of God. Between the Pharisees and the New Testament teachers there was no dispute as to the sole sovereignty of God, or that He was the Creator and upholder of all things. But it is well to lay stress upon the Pharisaic belief in the nearness of God and the directness of access to Him; also to make clear the fact that emphatic resistance was offered by the Pharisees to any idea of a plurality of divine persons. They would own no being who could be regarded either as in some sense a second God, or as a mediator between God and man. That the Pharisees commonly thought of God as a cold abstraction, a distant and inaccessible Power, is by Christian scholars frequently but quite erroneously asserted. Of course, it was never denied that God was the Almighty, the Lord of all worlds, supreme over everything. Indeed, that was affirmed over and over again, and is one of the axioms of Pharisaic belief. But, whatever other Jews may have done, under the influence of Hellenism, the Pharisees never doubted for a moment that God Himself, the one supreme God, was actually near to every one of His people; "near, in every kind of nearness," as it was said (j. Ber. 13ª). That is the really effective belief of the Pharisees, as can be seen on well-nigh every page of the Talmud and the Midrash. How it was to be reconciled, if it needed to be reconciled, with the belief in the abstract infinity of God, was a question which the Pharisees never troubled to answer, even if they were aware of it. There was no Jewish philosophy of religion till long after the closing of the Talmud. And the Pharisees most certainly did not logically develop their conception of God from their idea of the Torah. Whether, even if they had done so, they would have arrived at the barren abstraction, which Weber declares to have been the Pharisaic idea of God (Weber, _System_, etc., p. 149), is open to question. But they never allowed any theoretical reasoning which would prevent them from owning the love and goodness of God, or which would place an impassable gulf between Him and His creatures. The following piece of Haggadah illustrates this point: "It is said (Exod. xx. 1), 'And God spake all these words.' He doeth the whole at once (_i.e._ in one action). He kills and He makes alive, in one action. He wounds and He heals, in one action.