Philo of Alexandria wrote his Questions and Answers on Genesis as a Jewish philosopher standing inside the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world. He composed the treatise in the early first century, working through the opening chapters of Genesis verse by verse, posing a question and then supplying an answer on two levels: first the plain historical sense, then a spiritual sense drawn from the soul’s inner life. Books One through Three of that commentary carry the reader from the creation of man in Eden through the flood and into the early history of Abraham. Christians reading this material today gain a direct window into the world that produced the New Testament, a world where Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy pressed against one another daily. Philo’s project deserves careful attention precisely because it shows both what a brilliant mind can achieve when it takes Scripture seriously and what happens when that mind subordinates the text to an inherited philosophical system.
Literary Backgrounds
Alexandria in Philo’s lifetime held the Great Library, the Museum, and a Jewish population large enough to occupy two of the city’s five sectors under its own civic structure. Philo grew up in this environment as a member of the Hellenistic Jewish elite, trained in Greek paideia and steeped in the Septuagint, which he regarded as an inspired translation rather than a secondary rendering of the Hebrew. He borrowed his commentary’s form, the zētēmata kai lyseis, from the scholarly apparatus that Alexandrian critics such as Aristarchus applied to Homer. Applying that apparatus to Moses signaled Philo’s conviction that the Pentateuch deserved the same rigorous, question-driven scrutiny that Greek scholars gave their canonical poet, and that scrutiny would vindicate Moses as the older and truer source of wisdom.
Book One works through Genesis 2:4 to 6:8, covering the formation of the second man, the planting of Eden, the fall, and the early genealogies. Book Two follows Noah through the flood and the covenant that follows it. Book Three moves into Abram’s vision, the covenant between the pieces, Hagar and Ishmael, and the covenant of circumcision. In every entry Philo names a textual difficulty in the Septuagint, then resolves it on the literal level before pressing further into what he calls the level directed toward the mind, τὸ πρὸς διάνοιαν. Etymology drives much of this second movement: Adam becomes earth-born mind, Cain becomes self-centered possession, Abraham becomes father of sound intellect, Sarah becomes sovereign virtue. Numbers carry meaning as well, with seven signifying virgin perfection and forty signifying purification, a habit inherited from Pythagorean arithmology.
Theological and Ethical Analysis
Philo builds his allegorical reading on a Middle Platonic foundation borrowed heavily from Plato’s Timaeus. He reads the two creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 as descriptions of two different humanities: the incorporeal image of Genesis 1:27 belongs to the intelligible realm, the κόσμος νοητός, while the earthly man of Genesis 2:7 belongs to the sensible realm, the κόσμος αἰσθητός. Eden becomes the rational soul itself. Adam becomes νοῦς, the mind. Eve becomes αἴσθησις, sense-perception. The serpent becomes ἡδονή, pleasure, and the fall becomes the mind’s capitulation to sensory appetite rather than a historical act of rebellion against a spoken command. Philo layers Stoic vocabulary onto this Platonic frame as well, describing the divine λόγος as the instrument through which God fashions and sustains the cosmos, and reading Adam’s fall as a loss of ἀπάθεια, freedom from passion.
This system produces genuine moral insight at points. Philo’s picture of the mind’s struggle against unruly appetite tracks something real in human experience, and his insistence that Scripture rewards patient, word-by-word attention models a seriousness modern readers often lack. But the system extracts a price. Once Adam, Eve, Noah, and Abraham become symbols for psychological states, the historical spine of Genesis dissolves into ethical instruction detached from the acts of God in time. Scripture presents a good and unified creation, a real rebellion against a real command, and a real curse falling on a real world. Philo’s dualism, in which the physical inherently ranks below the intelligible, imports a metaphysical hierarchy that Genesis itself does not teach.
Old Testament Analysis and Critique
Genesis 2:4–17 describes Yahweh forming אָדָם from אֲדָמָה and breathing נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים into his nostrils, producing a single נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה rather than two separate humanities. The man receives a sanctuary charge, to work and to guard the garden, language that marks Eden as holy space and anticipates the priestly vocabulary later attached to the tabernacle. The two trees establish a moral test bound up with covenantal obedience, not an allegory for competing psychological faculties. Genesis 6:1–8 records the collapse of created boundaries and God’s grief over human violence, culminating in Noah finding favor in his sight. Genesis 15 shows Yahweh cutting a covenant with Abram, crediting his trust as righteousness and passing between the divided animals as a self-maledictory pledge to keep a promise that will unfold across real history: land, offspring, and blessing for the nations.
Philo’s treatment of each passage relocates the drama from history into the soul. He reads the divided animals in Genesis 15 as a philosophical exercise in dividing opposites rather than as an ancient Near Eastern oath ceremony binding God to a promise he intends to keep in space and time. He retains the physical practice of circumcision in Genesis 17 but grounds its real meaning in the excision of pride and pleasure rather than in covenant membership. The literal sense survives in Philo’s system, but only as scaffolding for the allegory that follows, and the covenant loses its forward motion toward a historical fulfillment.
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