Greek philosophical terminology in Philo and early Jewish literature
When a Jewish writer in Alexandria wrote in Greek, he did not only translate his religion into a new language. He inherited a vocabulary that already had jobs. Logos already meant, in ordinary Greek, an account, a reckoning, a speech, a reason. Sophia already meant skill and wisdom. Nomos already meant law and custom. Kosmos already meant order before it meant world. A Jewish writer who used those words was not starting from nothing: he was taking over tools with a history, and putting them to work on Genesis, on the Law, and on the claim that the God of Israel is the God of the whole ordered world.
This essay follows six such words — logos, sophia, nous, kosmos, pneuma, nomos — from their Greek philosophical use into Philo of Alexandria (about 20 BCE to about 50 CE), the Wisdom of Solomon (usually placed in first-century BCE Alexandria), the fragments of Aristobulus (second century BCE, surviving only in Eusebius), and Josephus (first century CE) where he is relevant. Two cautions govern everything that follows. First, the counts are counts of Greek word-forms in the site’s indexed Greek corpus, not of English words: an English translation may render one Greek word as “Reason” in one sentence and “Word” in the next, and the index counts the Greek, not the translator’s choice. Second, shared vocabulary is not proof of borrowing. Philo and Justin both use logos language; Justin does not name Philo, and this essay does not claim he copied him. What can be shown is the word’s journey: what it did in Plato and the Stoics, what it was made to do in Jewish hands, and what changed in the move.
How to read the counts. Each section opens with the Day 14 index figure for its word: total occurrences in the indexed Greek corpus and the number of works in which it occurs, with the leading work named. The figures are a map of where a word lives, not a measure of importance — logos is everywhere because it is an ordinary word as well as a technical one, and a rare word can matter more in one passage than a common word matters in a hundred. The passages, not the totals, carry the argument.
1. Logos: from reason to the Word by which the world was made
Logos is the largest case and the messiest, which is why it comes first. The Day 14 index counts 1,897 occurrences in 174 works — more than any other term in this essay except psyche, which is not one of the six. Most of those occurrences are unremarkable: an account, a speech, an argument. The philosophical career of the word begins when it stops meaning a particular speech and starts meaning the rationality behind things.
Plato uses logos constantly, usually in its ordinary senses; the Stoics are the ones who make it cosmic. For the Stoa, the logos is the rational principle that structures the universe and the share of it in each human mind. The early Stoa — Zeno, Cleanthes, Chrysippus — does not survive on this site except in fragments and reports, so the Stoic voice here is a later one, Marcus Aurelius, writing in the second century CE as a Stoic emperor. His formulation is the classical Stoic one in miniature:
“The substance of the universe is obedient and compliant; and the reason which governs it has in itself no cause for doing evil, for it has no malice, nor does it do evil to anything, nor is anything harmed by it. But all things are made and perfected according to this reason.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6
Note what the governing reason is not. It is not a person, not a speaker, not an agent distinct from the universe it governs. It is the universe’s own rationality, immanent in the substance it orders.
Philo keeps the cosmic scope and changes almost everything else. In On the Creation of the World, commenting on Genesis 1, he argues that God, before making the visible world, formed the intelligible one — an incorporeal model — and then made the corporeal world after it:
“using an incorporeal model formed as far as possible on the image of God, he might then make this corporeal world, a younger likeness of the elder creation” — Philo, On the Creation of the World, §§1–25
And the model itself, Philo says in the same passage, is the divine logos. The sentence is worth giving in both languages, because the English translation hides the term behind “Reason”:
“It is manifest also, that the archetypal seal, which we call that world which is perceptible only to the intellect, must itself be the archetypal model, the idea of ideas, the Reason of God.”
“…ὁ θεοῦ λόγος” — literally, “the Word (logos) of God.”
That is the move in one clause. Plato’s craftsman in the Timaeus looks to an eternal model outside himself; Philo’s model is God’s own thought, and it is called logos. And Philo says so as Moses’ doctrine, not his own invention: “this is the doctrine of Moses, not mine.” The philosophical term has been anchored to Genesis 1:27 — man made in the image of God — so that the image, the model, and the Word converge. Elsewhere Philo compresses the whole doctrine into a single sentence:
“Now the image of God is the Word, by which all the world was made.” — Philo, On the Creation of Magistrates (On the Special Laws), Book 1, §§76–100
The Wisdom of Solomon, writing in Greek in Alexandria before Philo, had already made the same kind of move with the same word, though in a more poetic register. Its prayer for wisdom opens by pairing the two great terms of this essay:
“O God of my fathers, and Lord of mercy, who hast made all things with thy word, And ordained man through thy wisdom, that he should have dominion over the creatures which thou hast made” — Wisdom of Solomon 9:1–2
“ὁ ποιήσας τὰ πάντα ἐν λόγῳ σου” — “who hast made all things by thy word (logos).”
And in chapter 18 the Word becomes an agent, almost a character, descending to strike Egypt:
“Thine Almighty word leaped down from heaven out of thy royal throne, as a fierce man of war into the midst of a land of destruction” — Wisdom of Solomon 18:15
“ὁ παντοδύναμός σου λόγος ἀπ’ οὐρανῶν ἐκ θρόνων βασιλείων”
Between Wisdom’s warrior Word and Philo’s archetypal model, the word has travelled from poetry to metaphysics without changing its spelling. A century after Philo, Justin Martyr gives the logos its fullest list of names, in a passage this site pairs with Philo’s in the Connections index:
“God begot before all creatures a Beginning, [who was] a certain rational power [proceeding] from Himself, who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the Glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos” — Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 61
Justin does not name Philo here, and the essay does not supply the name for him. What the passage shows is the endpoint of the journey: a word that meant “account” in a law court, “reason” in the Stoa, and “model” in Philo, now names a begotten being with a biography — appearing to Joshua, as Justin goes on to say, in human form. Each step kept the previous step’s prestige and added a new referent: cosmic reason, then God’s thought, then God’s agent.
2. Sophia: wisdom as a person at God’s side
The index counts sophia 281 times in 84 works, led by Sirach (23 occurrences) and Wisdom of Solomon (16). In Plato, sophia is a virtue, the knowledge that makes the other virtues work; in Aristotle it is the highest intellectual virtue, contemplation of first principles. The Jewish writers keep the praise and change the subject: wisdom is no longer only something a person has. It is something that was with God before people existed, and that acts in history.
Wisdom of Solomon 8 opens with the image that carries the whole book:
“Wisdom reacheth from one end to another mightily: and sweetly doth she order all things.” — Wisdom of Solomon 8:1
The prayer of chapter 9 then asks for the wisdom that “sitteth by thy throne” (9:4), and the book goes on to retell Israel’s history as wisdom’s biography: she preserved Adam, preserved Noah, found Abraham, delivered Lot. The grammatical feminine does much of the work — sophia is feminine in Greek, so personification comes almost free — but the theological move is deliberate: the attribute by which God orders the world is presented as a companion who shares the throne and the labour. Philo inherits this figure and philosophises it further, pairing sophia with logos as the instruments of creation; but the decisive Jewish step is already taken in Wisdom, and it is a step Greek philosophy had not taken. Plato’s sophia never sat by anyone’s throne. It was a quality of a soul, not a sharer in making the world.
A limit belongs here. Wisdom’s personification is poetic and functional, not a second deity: the book never prays to Wisdom as a god, and its Wisdom remains God’s own wisdom, possessed and sent. The essay’s claim is therefore narrow and, for that reason, firm: Jewish writers took a virtue word and gave it a career in creation and history, stopping short of the independent divine person that later Christian writers would find in the same passages. The word’s later history is not read back into it.
3. Nous: the mind as the reader’s key
Nous — mind, intellect — is counted 873 times in 86 works, and its leading work on this site is Philo’s Allegories of the Sacred Laws, with 105 occurrences. That concentration is itself evidence: for Philo, nous is not one topic among others but the instrument of his whole method. Where the biblical text says “Adam”, Philo’s allegory reads “the mind”:
“It is therefore very natural that Adam, that is to say the mind, when he was giving names to and displaying his comprehension of the other animals, did not give a name to himself, because he was ignorant of himself and of his own nature.” — Philo, Allegories of the Sacred Laws
The creation story becomes a map of the soul: Adam is nous, Eve is sense-perception, the serpent is pleasure, and the whole Genesis narrative is re-read as psychology. The warrant for the method is Genesis 1:27 itself, read through the term:
“the mind, which was created in accordance with the image and idea of God, may be justly said to partake in his spirit, for its reasoning has strength” — Philo, Allegories of the Sacred Laws
Here the borrowing runs in the opposite direction from logos. With logos, a philosophical term was given a biblical referent (creation). With nous, a biblical character was given a philosophical identity (mind). The term does not describe the world here; it unlocks the text. That is why nous clusters in the Allegories rather than in Philo’s historical treatises: it is a reader’s tool, and its frequency marks where the allegorical reading is doing its work.
4. Kosmos: the ordered world that the Law mirrors
Kosmos is counted 311 times in 80 works, led by Philo’s On the Incorruptibility of the World (44 occurrences). The word’s history is the history of an idea: from “order” and “adornment” in early Greek, to the ordered universe in Plato’s Timaeus and the Stoics. Philo takes the ordered universe and makes it the twin of the Torah. The opening of On the Creation states the correspondence that governs his whole reading of Moses:
“embracing the creation of the world, under the idea that the law corresponds to the world and the world to the law, and that a man who is obedient to the law, being, by so doing, a citizen of the world, arranges his actions with reference to the intention of nature, in harmony with which the whole universal world is regulated.” — Philo, On the Creation of the World, §§1–25
For a Greek philosopher, the kosmos is regulated by nature; for Philo, nature’s regulation and the Law’s regulation are the same regulation seen twice, so that obeying the Law is citizenship in the universe. The term thus does political work as well as cosmological work: a Jew keeping the Law in Alexandria is not following a tribal custom but living by the order of the world itself. And the creation passage of section 1 returns here with its full force: the visible kosmos is “a younger likeness of the elder creation”, the intelligible world. Philo’s kosmos is therefore always double — the world you see and the world of ideas it copies — in a way that Plato’s Timaeus had suggested and that Philo, reading Moses, made systematic.
5. Pneuma: spirit, breath, and a philosopher’s distinction
Pneuma is counted 185 times in 73 works, led by Wisdom of Solomon (15 occurrences). In Greek the word covers wind, breath, and spirit without sharp boundaries; in the Septuagint it renders the Hebrew ruach across the same range, from the wind over the waters to the spirit of God. Wisdom’s use is the most expansive on the site:
“For thine incorruptible Spirit is in all things.” — Wisdom of Solomon 12:1
Philo, commenting on Genesis 2:7 — God breathing the breath of life into man — draws a distinction that only a philosopher reading a translation would draw. Moses, he insists, wrote “breath”, not “spirit”, and the two are not the same:
“Moses has used the word breath, not spirit, as there is a difference between the two words; for spirit is conceived of according to strength, and intensity, and power; but breath is a gentle and moderate kind of breeze and exhalation” — Philo, Allegories of the Sacred Laws
The distinction lets Philo have it both ways: the inbreathing is gentle because it is breath, and the mind it creates is strong because it partakes in spirit, “for its reasoning has strength” (section 3 above). A single Hebrew word, rendered in Greek, has been split by philosophy into two Greek words with different jobs. This is borrowing at its most technical: not a grand term like logos, but a lexicographer’s distinction applied to one verse, in the service of the claim that man’s mind shares in God’s spirit without being God’s spirit.
6. Nomos: law as nature, and the control case
Nomos is counted 480 times in 114 works, led by Plato’s Laws (88 occurrences) — the dialogue in which law itself is the subject, and in which the Athenian Stranger argues that the best law is the one that accords with reason and nature. That Platonic background is exactly what Philo exploits in the law-and-world correspondence of section 4: Torah is not an arbitrary code but the nomos of the kosmos, written down. For Philo, Moses is therefore not only a lawgiver but a philosopher, and his exordium — the creation story placed before any commandment — is the proof: a lawbook that begins with cosmology is announcing that its laws are nature’s laws.
Josephus is the control case, and he matters precisely because he does not do what Philo does. His retelling of Genesis opens without any philosophical term at all:
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” — Josephus, Antiquities, Book 1, Chapter 1
Josephus writes history, for a Roman audience, in the manner of a Greek historian: the story told plainly, the antiquity of the record stressed, the philosophy left out. The same Greek language, the same biblical material, the same century — and no logos doctrine, no nous allegory, no law-as-cosmos. The contrast proves that Philo’s terminology was a choice, not a necessity of writing Judaism in Greek. A Jewish writer could write Greek history without Greek metaphysics. Philo chose the metaphysics, and chose it because his audience — educated Alexandrians, Jewish and Greek — would hear the terms and recognise the argument: this Law is philosophy, and this philosophy is Moses’.
The precedent for Philo’s choice is older than Philo, and it survives only because a Christian preserved it. Aristobulus of Alexandria, in the second century BCE, was already answering a king’s question about the Bible’s physical language for God — hands, arms, face, feet, walking — by reading it figuratively, as the companion essay on the Fathers quotes at length:
“take the interpretations in a natural way, and to hold fast the fitting conception of God, and not to fall off into the idea of a fabulous anthropomorphic constitution.” — Aristobulus, Fragments, preserved in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel
Aristobulus’s method is Philo’s method in embryo: the letter cannot mean what it says about God, so it must mean something philosophically fitting, and the Greek philosophical vocabulary supplies the fitting meaning. Philo is not the inventor of Hellenistic Jewish allegory. He is its most systematic practitioner, working a method that was already a century old when he began, and that reached us only through Eusebius’s quotation.
Conclusion: borrowing as translation
Put together, the six words describe a single process with different local shapes. Logos moves from reason to model to agent. Sophia moves from virtue to companion at the throne. Nous moves from faculty to the key that unlocks Genesis. Kosmos moves from order to the twin of the Law. Pneuma is split, by a philosopher’s distinction, into breath and spirit. Nomos is raised from civic custom to cosmic law — and Josephus shows that the raising was optional.
The common thread is that none of these moves abandons the Jewish referent. Philo’s logos is still God’s, not a second god; Wisdom’s sophia still sits by God’s throne rather than on her own; the nomos is still Moses’. The Greek words keep their Greek prestige — that is why they were borrowed — but they are made to point at Genesis, at the Law, and at one God. That is what borrowing meant in Hellenistic Judaism: not copying a philosophy, but translating a religion into the only philosophical language its neighbours would recognise as serious, and discovering, in the translation, arguments the original had not made explicit. The terms index lets a reader check every step of that claim: the counts say where each word lives, and the passages, linked above, say what it was doing there.
Related: Logos term page · Sophia term page · Nous term page · Kosmos term page · Pneuma term page · Nomos term page · Philo’s Word and Justin’s Logos · Plato’s craftsman and Philo’s model · Companion essay: Parallel passages between ancient authors · Fathers and Jewish traditions
Bibliography
- Harry A. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1947) — print; the classic study of Philo’s philosophical system, including the Logos doctrine and the allegorical method.
- David T. Runia, Philo of Alexandria and the Timaeus of Plato (Leiden: Brill, 1986) — print; the detailed account of Philo’s use of the Timaeus, model and copy, in On the Creation.
- David Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon, Anchor Bible vol. 43 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1979) — print; commentary with full discussion of Wisdom’s personified Sophia and its Greek philosophical background.
- John J. Collins, Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997) — print; Sirach and Wisdom in their Hellenistic setting, and the Wisdom figure’s career.
- Carl R. Holladay, Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors, 4 vols. (Chico/Atlanta: Scholars Press/SBL, 1983–1996) — print; critical texts and translations of Aristobulus and the other fragmentary Hellenistic Jewish writers.
- Philo, Works, translated by C. D. Yonge (London, 1854–1855) — open access (public domain); the translation quoted on this site, linked above to its work pages.
- Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, in Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 1 — open access (public domain); the translation quoted on this site.
- The Wisdom of Solomon, King James Version Apocrypha — open access (public domain); the translation quoted on this site.
Feeds the Day 19 bibliography: the print items above are carried into the scholar’s resources bibliography, with the open-access editions linked from their work pages.