Among the ideas which were borrowed by Judaism from the Persian religion belonged those connected with the mediatory "Word." As the creative power of the Godhead, the bearer of revelation and representative of God upon earth, the expression "the word" had already appeared in aphoristic literature. Under Græco-Egyptian influence the term "wisdom" (sophia) had become the naturalised expression for it. "Wisdom" served to describe the activities in regard to man of the God who held aloof from the world. In this connection it may be noted that according to Persian ideas "Wisdom" under the name of Spenta Armaiti was considered as one of the six or seven Amesha Spentas (Amshaspands), those spirits that stood as a bodyguard closest to the throne of God and corresponded to the Jewish archangels. She was considered by the Persians as the daughter or spouse of Ahuramazda. Already, in the so-called "Wisdom of Solomon," written by an Alexandrian Jew in the last century before Christ, she was declared to be a separately existing spirit in close relation to God. Under the guise of a half-personal, half-material being--a power controlling the whole of nature--she was described as the principle of the revelation of God in the creation, maintenance, and ruling of the world, as the common principle of life from on high and as the intermediary organ of religious salvation. Just as Plato had sought to overcome the dualism of the ideal and the material world by the conception of a "world-soul," so "Wisdom" was intended to serve as an intermediary between the opposites, the God of the Jews and his creation. These efforts were continued by the Alexandrian Jew Philo (30 B.C. to 50 A.D.), who tried to bring the Perso-Jewish conception of the "Word" or "Wisdom" into closer accord with the ideas of Greek philosophy than the author of the "Book of Wisdom" had already done. Philo, too, commenced with the opposition between an unknowable, unnameable God, absolutely raised above the world, and material created existence. He imagined this opposition bridged over by means of "powers" which, as relatively self-existing individuals, messengers, servants, and representatives of God, at one time more closely resembled Persian angels or Greek Dæmons, at another time the Platonic "Ideas," the originals and patterns of God in creating. Essentially, however, they bore the character of the so-called "Fructifying powers," those creative forces which infused a soul and design into formless matter and by means of which the Stoic philosophers sought to explain existence. As the first of these intermediate forces, or, indeed, as the essence of them all, Philo considered the "Logos," efficacious reason or the creative word of God. He called him the "first-born son of God" or the "second God," the representative, interpreter, ambassador, Archangel of God, or Prince of Angels. He considered him as the High Priest, who made intercession with God for the world,