Six treatises from Philo of Alexandria’s Allegorical Commentary trace the human soul’s movement from bondage to sight of God. De Migratione Abrahami, De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia, De Fuga et Inventione, Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit, De Mutatione Nominum, and De Somniis (Books I and II) form a continuous meditation on Genesis 12, 15, 16, 17, and 28. Philo wrote as a Jewish aristocrat in Roman Alexandria, a city where his people faced both cultural pressure and, in 38 CE, violent persecution under the prefect Flaccus. His allegorical method answered two audiences at once: Jews tempted to discard the law for Greek philosophy, and Jews who read Moses so literally that they missed its deeper wisdom. For the Christian reader, these treatises offer a case study in how a brilliant mind, formed by both Scripture and Plato, tried to reconcile revelation and reason without a Savior. Examining Philo’s allegories alongside the New Testament clarifies where natural wisdom reaches its limit and where the gospel supplies what philosophy cannot.
Literary Backgrounds
These six works belong to the genre of philosophical commentary, moving verse by verse through the Septuagint text of Genesis and returning periodically to the controlling lemma after long excurses. Philo transforms the patriarchal narratives into a sustained psychological allegory. Abraham’s migration from Ur to Canaan becomes the soul’s departure from the body, from sense perception, and from spoken language toward the divine intellect. Hagar and Sarah, read through Genesis 16, become propaideuma and virtue, the preliminary Greek disciplines of grammar, geometry, astronomy, and music serving the higher pursuit of wisdom. This move borrows directly from Plato’s curriculum in the Republic, Book VII. In De Somniis, Philo draws on Plato’s Timaeus and Phaedrus to explain Jacob’s ladder as the movement of souls, which he equates with both Greek daimones and biblical angeloi, between earth and the aether. In Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit, the divine Word functions as a tomeus, a cutter who divides the sacrificial portions of Genesis 15, a role indebted to Stoic teaching on the pervasive rational principle governing the cosmos. Philo’s prose favors etymological wordplay, deriving spiritual meaning from Hebrew names rendered in Greek, so that Israel becomes “the one who sees God” and Abraham “father of sound.” The tone throughout remains instructional and persuasive, aimed at drawing the reader upward through successive stages of discipline.
Theological and Ethical Analysis
Philo’s central conviction is that every syllable of the Septuagint carries divine weight, and that the deepest meaning of the text lies beneath its historical surface. This conviction produces genuine theological insight alongside serious distortion. His treatment of Abraham’s call in De Migratione rightly recognizes that following God requires a real inward break with the world’s values, a truth Scripture itself teaches. But Philo consistently converts historical, bodily, and covenantal realities into abstractions of the mind. The land promised to Abraham becomes wisdom rather than actual territory. The heir promised in Genesis 15 becomes the soul’s grasp of divine truth rather than the literal son through whom God would build a nation and, in time, send a Redeemer. In Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit, Philo’s account of prophetic ecstasy describes the human mind vacating itself so that divine reason might occupy the space, a picture closer to Greek notions of inspired trance than to the prophets of Israel, who spoke as conscious agents entrusted with the word of Yahweh. The ethical vision that results is one of ascent by disciplined contemplation, a philosopher’s path to God rather than a sinner’s rescue by grace.
Old Testament Analysis and Critique
Read on their own terms, Genesis 12, 15, 16, and 28 describe Yahweh acting concretely in history for the sake of a real people. In Genesis 12:1–4, the command לֶךְ־לְךָ inaugurates a threefold covenant of land, nationhood, and blessing that will bless “all the families of the earth.” In Genesis 15:1–6, Abram’s distress over his childlessness receives a direct answer: a biological heir and offspring as numerous as the stars, met by Abram’s trust, which Yahweh counts to him as צְדָקָה. Genesis 16 records Sarai and Hagar in a domestic arrangement documented in surrounding Near Eastern legal custom, yet Yahweh meets Hagar personally at Beer-lahai-roi, extending covenant care even to a vulnerable Egyptian slave outside the promised line. Genesis 28:10–22 shows Jacob, a fugitive from his brother’s anger, receiving the reaffirmed Abrahamic promise in a dream of a ladder reaching to heaven, with Yahweh himself standing above it. Philo’s allegory, by contrast, empties these episodes of their historical particularity. He is right that Abram’s faith is the theological center of Genesis 15:6, but he wrongly detaches that faith from the physical promise it answered. Scripture does not ask its readers to leave the body and the land behind for pure intellect; it insists that God works through real flesh, real families, and real history toward a redemption that will itself become flesh.
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