Hellenistic Judaism: What It Was and How Philo Read the Bible with Plato

Hellenistic Judaism and Philo of Alexandria

Hellenistic Judaism is the shorthand for Jewish thought that took shape inside Greek culture, and it flourished in Alexandria: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats Philo as the most significant and philosophically developed case of the Judeo-Hellenistic syncretism that grew up there. The Jewish Encyclopedia reports that Philo was born around 20 BCE in Alexandria in Egypt and died after 40 CE. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy also dates his life from about 20 BCE to 40 CE and adds that his family was wealthy and prominent in the Jewish community of the city. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy places his life between the last decades BCE and the middle of the first century CE, and notes that he received an advanced Greek education in philosophy and in the liberal arts.

That schooling left its mark. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Philo had read the Greek philosophers widely and admired them, and his own learning came out of that reading: the tradition born in the cities of ancient Greece, from the pre-Socratic philosophers onward, was as familiar to him as the Bible. Two bodies of learning, then, and the work of making them agree.

Then there is the politics. In 40 CE the Jewish community of Alexandria sent a delegation to the emperor Caligula, at the head of the Roman Empire, and Philo was one of its members, as the Jewish Encyclopedia records. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy specifies that the embassy followed a riot and that Philo went in person, leaving a written account, the Legatio ad Gaium. The philosopher who wrote about the Logos found himself in Rome, speaking for his own community.

Two readings of one text

Philo does not take the Bible for a collection of stories and nothing further. The text, for him, works on two levels.

His method rests on an idea the Jewish Encyclopedia sums up as the double meaning of Scripture, literal and allegorical. That entry identifies allegory as the instrument with which Philo tries to fuse and harmonise Greek wisdom and the Jewish religion inside his own philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows how it works on the legal texts: Philo takes them at face value, as rules to be observed, and reads them at the same time as symbols of intelligible realities, things grasped by thought. The operation comes with a stated limit, since the Stanford entry reports that for Philo the hidden meanings of the biblical texts are reached only with God’s help. The interpreter does not get wherever he likes on skill alone.

Practical example: take one of the food laws of the Torah. On Philo’s reading it remains a rule to follow in daily life, and it becomes at the same moment the symbol of something available only to thought, a discipline of the soul for instance. The rule still holds for whoever observes it, and whoever interprets it also recognises the symbol.

The Logos, as much of God as thought can reach

For the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the Logos is not God, because God in full stays out of reach of the human mind; the Logos is whatever of the divine essence turns out to be understandable to a human being. It works as a threshold, the point where the unbounded becomes legible.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy looks at the Logos from the side of how the world runs and describes it as the bond holding all the parts of the universe together, with a function like the one it serves in the human soul towards the body. In the pages of that encyclopedia the Logos receives two further descriptions, as the thoughts of God taken together and as those same thoughts hypostatised so that a physical world could be created. Philo’s vocabulary then picks up an image from Jewish life: the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that the Logos is compared to the high priest, an office that after the Exile had become the real centre of the Jewish state.

The ground Philo builds on

A synthesis on this scale does not appear from nowhere. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes that Philo’s thought reflects the Platonism of his time, a version into which Stoic doctrine and Stoic words had already entered, carried by philosophers such as Antiochus of Ascalon. The allegorical method comes from a distance as well, since the IEP sets it within a Greek tradition of reading stories allegorically and offers Theagenes of Rhegium as a precedent.

Even Philo’s boldest claim had circulated before him. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy recalls that earlier Jewish thinkers, Aristobulus in particular, had already proposed a Plato inspired by Moses. Philo picks the claim up and pushes it to its limit, because the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that he ends by presenting Moses as the first sage and the teacher of the early Greek thinkers.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy adds one more thing about that body of work: the concepts Philo worked out went on to shape Hellenistic readings of Jewish messianic thought.