It is strange how little we know of the personal history of the greatest of uninspired Jewish

writers of old, though he occupied so prominent a position in his time.1 Philo was born in

Alexandria, about the year 20 before Christ. He was a descendant of Aaron, and belonged to

one of the wealthiest and most influential families among the Jewish merchant-princes of Egypt.

His brother was the political head of that community in Alexandria, and he himself on one

occasion represented his co-religionists, though unsuccessfully, at Rome,2 as the head of an

embassy to entreat the Emperor Caligula for protection from the persecutions consequent on the

Jewish resistance to placing statues of the Emperor in their Synagogues. But it is not with Philo,

the wealthy aristocratic Jew of Alexandria, but with the great writer and thinker who, so to

speak, completed Jewish Hellenism, that we have here to do. Let us see what was his relation

alike to heathen philosophy and to the Jewish faith, of both of which he was the ardent

advocate, and how in his system he combined the teaching of the two.

To begin with, Philo united in rare measure Greek learning with Jewish enthusiasm. In his

writings he very frequently uses classical modes of expression;3 he names not fewer than sixty-

four Greek writers;4 and he either alludes to, or quotes frequently from, such sources as Homer,

Hesiod, Pindar, Solon, the great Greek tragedians, Plato, and others. But to him these men

were scarcely `heathen.' He had sat at their feet, and learned to weave a system from

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The gatherings of these philosophers were `holy,'

and Plato was `the great.' But holier than all was the gathering of the true Israel; and

incomparably greater than any, Moses. From him had all sages learned, and with him alone was

all truth to be found - not, indeed, in the letter, but under the letter, of Holy Scripture. If in

Numb. xxiii. 19 we read `God is not a man,' and in Deut. i. 31 that the Lord was `as a man,'

did it not imply, on the one hand, the revelation of absolute truth by God, and, on the other,

accommodation to those who were weak? Here, then, was the principle of a twofold

interpretation of the Word of God - the literal and the allegorical. The letter of the text must be

held fast; and Biblical personages and histories were real. But only narrow-minded slaves of the

letter would stop here; the more so, as sometimes the literal meaning alone would be tame, even

absurd; while the allegorical interpretation gave the true sense, even though it might occasionally

run counter to the letter. Thus, the patriarchs represented states of the soul; and, whatever the

letter might bear, Joseph represented one given to the fleshly, whom his brothers rightly hated;

Simeon the soul aiming after the higher; the killing of the Egyptian by Moses, the subjugation of

passion, and so on. But this allegorical interpretation - by the side of the literal (the Peshat of

the Palestinians) - though only for the few, was not arbitrary. It had its `laws,' and `canons' -