lo8 Science Religion and Reality 



These very laws are used as proof of the power, wisdom and 

 goodness of God, for the same reason that they are invoked in the 

 " Bridgewater Treatises " of more than two thousand years later. 

 The recognition of natural laws in Job is doubtless the result of 

 contact with Greek thought. 



In the yet later " Wisdom Literature," the contact with 

 Greek thought is yet closer. The characteristic features of Greek 

 physical philosophy have been largely absorbed, and peep out 

 unmistakably here and there. The relation of God to the natural 

 laws has also become modified. Not only does He not act on the 

 world directly, but He has become further removed therefrom 

 than in Job. There is another existence that governs the laws of 

 Nature and indeed makes them ; it is that elusive Wisdom, an 

 entity almost as hard to define as the Greek physis which it in some 

 ways resembles. Wisdom has some of the attributes of Deity. 

 She is omniscient, omnipotent, " she reaches from one end of the 

 world to the other and ordereth all things well " (Wisdom viii. i). 

 So far from God acting directly, it is " by His word that He made all 

 things and by His wisdom then He formed man " (Wisdom iv. i). 



Moreover, this new Jewish mode of thought has become self- 

 conscious and polemic. It sets itself deliberately over against 

 Greek thought. Among the Greeks various " first principles " 

 had been adopted. Thales had proposed water, Heracleitus fire, 

 Pythagoras the " circling stars," Anaximenes air, yet other philo- 

 sophers some vague essence that may perhaps be translated " winds," 

 and finally the new astrological science coming in from Babylon 

 had suggested the complex mathematical order of the heavenly 

 bodies as the motive power of all things. The "Wisdom of 

 Solomon," which was written in Alexandria about lOO b.c, 

 inveighs against all these : 



" Surely vain were all men in their natures, and without 



perception of God 

 Who could not from the good things that are seen know 



Him that is. 

 Neither by giving heed to the works did they recognise Him 



who hath wrought them, 

 But either fire, or wind or the swift air, 

 Or circling stars, or raging water, or the lights of heaven 

 They deemed the gods which govern the world." 



(Wisdom xiii. 1-2). 



