Anthropomorphisms
In many ways, one can consider this view of God to be different from the God of the Hebrew Bible, with more affinity for the idea or "form" (eidos) of Plato designated as Θεός (Theos), in contrast to matter. Nothing remained, therefore, but to set aside the descriptions of God in the Hebrew Bible by means of allegory.
Philo characterizes as a monstrous impiety the anthropomorphism of the Bible, which ascribes to God hands and feet, eyes and ears, tongue and windpipe. Scripture, he says, adapts itself to human conceptions; and for pedagogic reasons God is occasionally represented as a man. The same holds good also as regards God's anthropopathic attributes. God as such is untouched by unreasonable emotions, as appears, e.g., from Exodus ii. 12, where Moses, torn by his emotions, perceives God alone to be calm. He is free from sorrow, pain, and all such affections. But He is frequently represented as endowed with human emotions; and this serves to explain expressions referring to His repentance.
Similarly God cannot exist or change in space. He has no "where" (πού, obtained by changing the accent in Gen. iii. 9: "Adam, where art thou?"), is not in any place. He is Himself the place; the dwelling-place of God means the same as God Himself, as in the Mishnah = "God is" (comp. Freudenthal, "Hellenistische Studien," p. 73), corresponding to the tenet of Greek philosophy that the existence of all things is summed up in God.
God as such is motionless, as the Bible indicates by the phrase "God stands". It was difficult to harmonize the doctrine of God's namelessness with the Bible; and Philo was aided here by his imperfect knowledge of Greek. Not noticing that the Septuagint translated the divine name Yhwh by Κύριος, he thought himself justified in referring the two names Θεός and Κύριος to the two supreme divine faculties.
Philo's transcendent conception of the idea of God precluded the Creation as well as any activity of God in the world; it entirely separated God from man; and it deprived ethics of all religious basis. But Philo, who was a pious Jew, could not accept the un-Jewish, pagan conception of the world and the irreligious attitude which would have been the logical result of his own system; and so he accepted the Stoic doctrine of the immanence of God, which led him to statements opposed to those he had previously made. While he at first had placed God entirely outside of the world, he now regarded Him as the only actual being therein. God is the only real citizen of the world; all other beings are merely sojourners therein. While God as a transcendent being could not operate at all in the world, He is now considered as doing everything and as the only cause of all things. He creates not only once, but forever. He is identical with the Stoic "efficient cause." He is impelled to activity chiefly by His goodness, which is the basis of the Creation. God as creator is called Θεός. This designation also characterizes Him in conformity with His goodness, because all good gifts are derived from God, but not evil ones. Hence God must call upon other powers to aid Him in the creation of man, as He can have nothing to do with matter, which constitutes the physical nature of man: with evil He can have no connection; He can not even punish it. God stands in a special relation to man. The human soul is God's most characteristic work. It is a reflex of God, a part of the divine reason, just as in the system of the Stoics the human soul is an emanation of the World-Soul. The life of the soul is nourished and supported by God, Philo using for his illustrations the figures of the light and the fountain and the Biblical passages referring to these.
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