The two main heads of Biblical interpretation which the Jewish religious genius developed, Peshat and Derash,—these represent two permanent attitudes of mind. In the first the commentator tries to get at the exact meaning of the text before him, to make its lesson clear and discuss the circumstances of the composition, the exact relations of its parts. He is satisfied to take the writer of the Biblical book for what he says in his own form of utterance. In the second the commentator is more anxious to inculcate ideas and lessons which do not arise obviously from the text, and to widen the significance of what he finds in the Bible. The interpretation ceases to be a mere exposition; it becomes creative or conciliating thought, and the interpreter becomes a religious reformer, a philosopher, a prophet. To this school Philo belongs, and the framework of his teaching or the ingenuity by which he develops it from his text is of small account. It is what he teaches and what he considers to be the vital things in religion and life to which we must pay attention. Judged on this ground Philo is a supreme master of Derash, and must take a place among the most creative of the interpreters of the Bible.
IV
PHILO AND THE TORAH
Over and over again Philo declares that his function is to expound the law of Moses. Moses was the interpreter of God's word to Israel; and Philo aspired to be the interpreter of the revelation of Moses to the Hellenistic world, "the living voice of the holy law." He believed that Israel was a chosen people in the sense that it had received the Divine message on behalf of the whole human race,[126] a Kingdom of Priests, in that it occupied to other nations the position which the priest—using the word in the fullest sense—occupied to the common people.[127] The Torah is God's covenant, not only with one small nation, but with all His children, and its teachings are true for all times and for all places. "The Bible," as Professor Butcher says,[128] "is the one book which appears to have the capacity of eternal self-adjustment, of uninterrupted correspondence with an ever-shifting and ever-widening environment." Nowadays this appears a truism, but the truth first presented itself to the Jewish-Alexandrian community when they came in contact with external culture. The Palestinian and Babylonian Jews, free for the most part from outside influences, developed the Torah for the Jewish people, amplified the tradition, and determined [pg.105] the Halakah, the practical law. But the Alexandrian Jews in the first place found their own attitude to the Torah affected by their acquaintance with Greek ethics and metaphysics, and also found it necessary to interpret the Bible in a new fashion in order to make its value known to their environment. The Greek world required to be shown the general principle, the broad ethical idea in each ordinance. And thus it came about that the Alexandrian interpreters always emphasized the universal beneath the particular, the moral spirit beneath the forms.
It had been one of the chief functions of the prophets to demonstrate the moral import of the law. In their vision the God of Israel became the God of the universe, and His law of conduct was spread over all mankind. "For the law shall go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem" (Micah iv. 2). Philo in effect expounds Judaism in their spirit, though he speaks their message in the voice of Plato and to a people whose minds were trained in Greek culture. Yet it is significant that he wrote all his commentaries round the Five Books of Moses, and used the prophets and other Biblical books only to illustrate and support the Mosaic teaching, which contains the whole way of life and the whole religious philosophy. According to the rabbis also the Prophets formed only a complement to the Torah, "a species of Agadah";[129] and the prophetic vision of
[pg.106] Moses was much clearer than that of his successors. Philo, too, clearly realized that Judaism was the religion of the law. His view of the Torah is what the modern world would call uncritical: that is to say, he accepts the idea that the whole of the Five Books was an objective revelation to Moses at Sinai. But though—or because—he is innocent of the higher criticism, and believes in the literal inspiration of the Torah, his conception is none the less enlightened and spiritual. The law—the Divine Logos—is not the enactment of an outside power, arbitrarily imposed, and to be obeyed because of its miraculous origin; it is the expression of the human soul within, when raised to its highest power by the Divine inspiration. Every man may fit himself to receive the Divine word, which is, in modern language, revelation.[130] Moses, then, is distinguished above all other legislators, not because he alone received it, but because he received it in its purest form, and because he was the most noble interpreter of it. It is for this reason that the law of Moses is of universal validity for conduct. The Divine spirit possessed him so fully that his Logos, or revelation, is eternally true, and by following it all men become fit to be blessed with the Divine gift themselves. This is true of the other prophets of the Bible to a smaller degree, and in a still minor degree Philo hoped that it was true of himself.
It should be premised that the "law of nature" [pg.107] was at the time of Philo an idea as widely accepted as "evolution" is to-day. Men believed that by a study of the processes of the universe the individual might discover the law of conduct that should bring his action into harmony with the whole. What the Greek philosophers declared to be the privilege of the few, Philo declared to have been imparted by God to His people as their law of life. Hence the Mosaic legislation is the code of nature and reason, and the righteous man directs his conduct in accordance with those rules of nature by which the cosmos is ordered.[131] Obedience to the law should not be obedience to an outward prescription, but rather the following out of our own highest nature. The ideal which the Stoic sage continually aspired for and never attained to—the life according to nature and right reason—this Philo claimed had been accomplished in the Mosaic revelation, handed down by God to Israel and through them to the world.
Before we deal with Philo's treatment of the law in its narrower sense, it will be as well to consider briefly his interpretation of the historical parts of the Torah. Here likewise he finds ideas of natural reason and eternal truths embodied. To Philo, as we have seen, the Torah is a unity, and every part of it has equal validity and value. He had to contend against certain higher critics of his day, who declared that Genesis was a collection of myths [pg.108]