The Hellenistic Philosophers: Philo of Alexandria — Philo’s Allegory of the Ascending Soul: Departure, Discipline, and Divine Vision

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.

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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.

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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.

The Hellenistic Philosophers: Philo of Alexandria — Meeting Abraham and Joseph Through the Eyes of a First-Century Jewish Philosopher

Imagine defending the honor of your people before an emperor who considered himself a god. This was the task facing Philo of Alexandria, a wealthy Jewish statesman who led an embassy to the unstable Emperor Caligula in AD 39–40, only a year after Alexandrian mobs had brutalized the city’s Jewish population. Philo wrote his treatises On Abraham and On Joseph into this pressure cooker of cultural hostility, hoping to prove to a skeptical Greco-Roman world that the patriarchs of Genesis were not primitive tribal figures but the truest philosophers who ever lived. He called them “living laws,” men who embodied divine virtue before Moses ever received the written commandments at Sinai. For Christians today, stepping into Philo’s world offers a rare gift: a window into exactly how first-century Judaism read its own Scriptures, and a sharp contrast that throws the unique claims of the gospel into brilliant relief.

Literary Backgrounds: A Philosopher Reading Genesis Through Greek Eyes

Philo composed these works as part of his larger Exposition of the Law, casting Abraham as the man who acquires virtue through instruction and Joseph as the ideal statesman who navigates the treacherous waters of pagan governance. He wrote in the literary mode of Greco-Roman biography and encomium, praising his subjects the way a Greek orator might praise a philosopher-king. Abraham’s departure from Chaldea becomes, in Philo’s hands, not a literal journey across ancient Mesopotamia but the mind’s escape from astrology and materialism into contemplation of an invisible God, an image he borrows directly from Plato’s doctrine of the incorporeal realm. Joseph’s famous coat of many colors is reinterpreted as a symbol of the unstable, shifting nature of political life itself. Philo even leans on Homer as a literary authority, working to show educated Greek readers that the God of Israel had already been anticipating their own best philosophical intuitions for centuries. It is a dazzling display of cultural translation, one that reveals how seriously Second Temple Jews took the challenge of speaking truth into a hostile intellectual marketplace.

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Theological and Ethical Analysis: When Allegory Replaces History

Philo’s method carries real theological cost. Because he reads Genesis through a Middle Platonic lens, he consistently treats the visible, historical, and physical world as inferior to the invisible world of ideas that the soul must ascend toward. Sarah becomes a symbol for Royal Virtue, Hagar becomes a symbol for preliminary education, and Sodom becomes a symbol for the enslavement of reason to bodily appetite. Abraham’s offering of Isaac, one of the most theologically loaded scenes in the entire Old Testament, is flattened into an allegory of the soul returning Joy to God as His rightful property. Philo’s admiration for Scripture is genuine and his defense of Jewish monotheism against pagan idolatry is commendable, but his allegorical instinct consistently pulls the reader’s attention away from the concrete, space-and-time acts of the covenant-keeping God and toward the timeless self-improvement project of an elite philosophical mind.

Old Testament Analysis and Critique: Covenant History, Not Soul Symbolism

The original text of Genesis tells a very different story than Philo’s allegory suggests. When Yahweh calls Abram in Genesis 12:1–3, He does not summon a mind seeking abstract truth; He summons a childless old man with a sovereign, historical promise of land, offspring, and blessing for all the families of the earth. Genesis 15:6 declares that Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness because he trusted a specific, spoken covenant oath from Yahweh Himself, not because his intellect achieved philosophical enlightenment. Genesis 22 tests Abraham’s covenant loyalty on Mount Moriah, and God’s provision of the substitute ram demonstrates that His promises rest on divine grace rather than human moral achievement. The Joseph narrative follows the same pattern. Genesis 45:5 and Genesis 50:20 make the point explicit: God sovereignly used even the sinful betrayal of Joseph’s brothers to preserve His covenant family and advance His redemptive plan. This is not a manual for statesmanship. It is the record of the living God steering real history toward the salvation of a real people.