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.
4. Several other conceptions, however, do not belong at all to the intermediary powers, where Weber places them.(600) This applies to _Metatron_ (identical with the Persian Mithras),(601) whom the mystic lore calls the charioteer of the heavenly throne-chariot, represented by the rabbis as the highest of the angels, leader of the heavenly hosts, and vice-regent of God. That no cosmic power was ascribed to him is proved by the very fact of his identification with Enoch, whom the pre-Talmudic Haggadah describes as taken up into heaven and changed into an angel of the highest rank, standing near God's throne.(602)