More general statements are found in
Hellenistic Jewish writings of the Second Temple period. The author of the Second
Book of Maccabees states that “God “made heaven and earth out of things
non-existent (εκ ουκ οντων)” (2 Maccabees 7:28), “but
here, again, the question may be raised . . . whether the ‘things non-existent’
are absolutely or relatively non-existent,” as Wolfson puts it.” In other
words: the things are not considered existent before they are formed, but this
does not necessarily mean that the author believed in the doctrine of creatio
ex nihilo in the strict sense. (Menahem Kister, “Tohu wa-Bohu, Primordial
Elements and Creatio Ex Nihilo,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 14, no. 3
[2007]: 245)
Kister
quotes from Wolfson’s work on Philo. Here is a fuller quotation:
. . . in The Second Book of Maccabees, on the
other hand, it is said that God made heaven and earth and all that is therein
"out of things non-existent" (εξ ουκ οντων). But here, again, the
question may be raised whether the "formless matter" was itself
created or not, and also whether the "things non-existent" are
absolutely or relatively non-existent. Similarly inconclusive is the position of Aristeas on this
question. His argument that the deified heroes are not true gods because the
useful things which they invented are only combinations of things already
created but "they themselves did not make the apparatus (κατασκευην) of
the things" does not necessarily
imply that God's creation of the world was ex nihilo; it means no more
than what it says, namely, that the heroes merely took things which were
already a constructed apparatus and made new useful combinations of them,
whereas the Jewish God, being a true God, made each apparatus itself, but each
apparatus itself may have been made out of a formless matter and not
necessarily ex nihilo. If, therefore, an answer is to be found to the
question of Philo's position on the subject, it will have to be found in some
passage in which he definitely and unmistakably states that the preëxistent
matter out of which the world was created was itself created by God. (H. A.
Wolfson, Philo, 2 vols. [Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1962], 1:303)