Philo of Alexandria and the Cain and Abel narrative: Structure and Typology in Philo's exegesis of Genesis 4.1-8 (original) (raw)

PHILO’S RHETORICAL EXEGESIS IN LEGUM ALLEGORIA 1-3

To say with Émile Bréhier that the Legum Allegoriae are "the most important for knowing Philo’s ideas” is as true as to say that these treatises are “the most important for knowing the intellectual and religious personality of their author”, as Claude Mondésert quotes and comments in the introduction to his translation in French (Legum Allegoriae I-III, Paris: CERF, 1962, p. 15). And, if that is clear through a philosophical reading of their contents, is it not even clearer through the rhetorical analysis of each unit in their allegorical interpretation of the biblical text? I hope to demonstrate in my paper that Philo’s exegetical exposition of Genesis 2:1-3:19 clearly reflects the influence of ancient rhetorical theory, both in terms of argumentative structures of interpretation, and in terms of strategies of persuasion, in order to implant understanding in those who are without knowledge. And I will do it, analyzing some relevant passages of these three works of Philo, in light of the main patterns of argumentation taught by rhetoricians and sophists in his cultural milieu. It is, in fact, my conviction that Philo makes prolific use of the canons of rhetoric taught in the paideia schools of his time, to disclose and prove the philosophical ideas he saw in the text, putting rhetoric’s patterns of argumentation at the service of his exegetical exposition, mainly in the allegorical interpretation of Scripture.

After the Image and Likeness of Philo: Romans 1.18 32 and Philo of Alexandria's Exposition

After the Image and Likeness of Philo: A Comparison of Romans 1.18-32 and Philo of Alexandria’s Exposition, 2021

This thesis compares the themes and premises established in the first work of the Exposition, On the Creation of the Law According to Moses, and compares them with Romans 1.18-32 by Paul the Apostle. The theological assumptions of Rom 1.18-32 match not only central themes and concepts of Philo’s Exposition series but are logically interrelated in a way that mirrors Philo’s own arguments in the first two books of the Exposition series (On the Creation and On the Life of Abraham) as well as On the Life of Moses, a prequel or companion to the Exposition. Comparing Rom 1.18-23 to Philo’s Exposition helps us understand several puzzling features of the pericope. Philo’s Exposition helps us explain the complex compound allusion of Gen 1.26, Deut 4.15-18, and Ps 106.20 (105.20 LXX) in Rom 1.23 and the progression from failure to honor God, idolatry, and homosexual intercourse in Rom 1.18-27. Philo uses the language of “image” and “likeness” in Gen 1.26 to import Plato’s dual structure of the cosmos onto Gen 1-3 and to establish an anthropology in which the human mind is read as the likeness of the image of God. Decline into vice in Philo’s Exposition always begins with an impious refusal to honor the God knowable through creation. By valuing the pleasures of the senses enticed by the beauty of created things over knowledge of God, the rational human mind becomes disordered. Drawing from Middle Platonic and Stoic readings of Plato’s creation narrative in the Timaeus (Tim) as well as a tradition of reading Gen 1 as a cosmological hierarchy in Deut 4.15-19, Philo reads the bestowal of human dominion over creation in Gen 1.26, 28 as a placement of humans higher than animals on a hierarchy due to their possession of divine reason. Philo’s critiques of Egyptian-style animal worship are framed as a denigration of the human mind by worshipping irrational beasts. Philo treats sex as only appropriate when practiced temperately in marriage for the purposes of procreation, which informs his description of the men of Sodom in Abr 135-136. Moral transformation in Philo is either ascent or descent along the cosmological hierarchy as the mind becomes more like God or more like the lower elements of creation. These Philonic elements offer us a reading of Rom 1.18-27 as a descent down a Platonized and Stoicized hierarchy of Gen 1 in which humans degrade their rational likeness to the image of God by failing to honor God, degrade their dominion over animals by worshipping animals, and degrade the Gen 1.27-28 command for males and females to be fruitful and multiply. The choice of Egyptian-style polytheism and homosexual intercourse in Rom 1.23 and Rom 1.26-27 were likely chosen to supply inversions of the Gen 1 hierarchy on points describing God’s intentions for humans in Gen 1.26-28. The allusions to Jewish scripture combined with Middle Platonic and Stoic elements in Rom 1.18-32 (particularly in the assumption that humans are capable of knowing something of God through nature) indicate that this inversion of the Gen 1 hierarchy is more in agreement with a Philonic reading of Torah than with the Deut 4.15-19 tradition in isolation.

Allegoresis in Hellenistic Judaism: From LXX to Philo?

It is well known that Philo received a huge influence from his hellenistic environment, including in respect of his method of interpretation, the allegoresis. Nevertheless, he was not the first jewish writer in contact to this kind of hermeneutic. Is it possible to mention works from the Greek Bible as examples of texts produced before Philo which presents a similar method of interpretation? In this paper, I analyse passages from Wisdom of Solomon and Ecclesiasticus and I compare them to Philo's texts in order to verify if there is in these works something which could be considered as a forerunner to the allegorical reading developed by the Alexandrian. In doing so, I observe passages of these works which, according to Émile Bréhier, present a kind of allegoresis similar to Philo's. I notice that there are similarities indeed, but probably Bréhier did not study each passage in its details. Therefore, he seems to have misunderstood the real nature of what he calls allegory. After that, I present one more comparison, bringing to the scene a text that is not present in the LXX, but that has its relevance to this Greek translation: the Letter of Aristeas. In this text, differently from the other two, I do find a kind of reading close to Philo's interpretation, that I think should be called “philonic allegoresis”, because of its particularities. To sum up, in this paper I try to study part of the history of allegoresis in the Jewish Hellenistic context, by reading the original texts with attention and considering previous efforts of different scholars and philonists.