3 - PHILO'S ALLEGORICAL EXEGESIS OF SCRIPTURE

Summary

Almost everything Philo wrote about the Jewish Scriptures, and almost everything in those Scriptures, he interpreted allegorically. He regarded the Old Testament as the inspired Word of God – especially the Pentateuch, which could ‘never be convicted of false witness’ (Abr. 258) – and as ‘speaking to every man’ (Mut. Nom. 215). But Scripture, he believed, required careful interpretation. With a few exceptions, as we have already seen, his treatises are expositions of sections of the Pentateuch. Philo was a devout Jew (see above, pp. 2–5) and he took the Jewish Scriptures very seriously, but that did not mean that he took them literally at every point. In Philo's view, the Hebrew Scriptures were composed by their author(s) in a state comparable to that of the philosopher when inspired to recall intelligible Ideas beyond the world of sense and matter, and the Septuagint translators, filled with a similar kind of inspiration, produced an infallibly accurate rendering of the Hebrew into Greek. The Jewish prophet, when writing what was to become Scripture, was a man to whom ‘nothing is unknown’, since he possessed ‘a spiritual sun and unclouded rays to give him a full and clear apprehension of things unseen by sense but apprehended by the understanding [dianoia]’ (Spec. Leg. IV.192). They trained themselves with ‘the laws of their fathers, which could not possibly have been conceived by the human soul without divine inspiration’ (Omn. Prob. Lib. 80). Such an elevated view of the character of the Scriptures placed upon the Jewish scholar a heavy responsibility to seek a correct interpretation of them.