, [pg.37] "an assembly," and a homily was a discourse delivered to an assembly. The Meturgeman of Palestine and Babylon, who expounded the Hebrew text in Aramaic, became the preacher of Alexandria, who gave, in Greek, of course, homiletical expositions of the law. In the great synagogue each Sabbath some leader in the community would give a harangue to the assembly, starting from a Biblical text and deducing from it or weaving into it the ideas of Hellenic wisdom, touched by Jewish influence; for the synagogues at Alexandria as elsewhere were the schools (Schule) as much as the houses of prayer; schools, as Philo says, of "temperance, bravery, prudence, justice, piety, holiness, and in short of all virtues by which things human and Divine are well ordered."[29] He speaks repeatedly of the Sabbath gatherings, when the Jews would become, as he puts it, a community of philosophers,[30] as they listened to the exegesis of the preacher, who by allegorical and homiletical fancies would make a verse or chapter of the Torah live again with a new meaning to his audience. The Alexandrian Jews, though the form of their writing was influenced by the Greeks, probably brought with them from Palestine primitive traces of allegorism. Allegory and its counterpart, allegorical interpretation, are deeply imbedded in the Oriental mind, and we hear of ancient schools of symbolists in the oldest portions of the [pg.38] Talmud.[31] At what period the Alexandrians began to use allegorical interpretation for the purpose of harmonizing Greek ideas with the Bible we do not know, but the first writer in this style of whom we have record (though scholars consider that his fragments are of doubtful authenticity) is Aristobulus. He is said to have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philometor, and he must have written at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. He dedicated to the king his "Exegesis of the Mosaic Law," which was an attempt to reveal the teachings of the Peripatetic system, i.e., the philosophy of Aristotle, within the text of the Pentateuch. All anthropomorphic expressions are explained away allegorically, and God's activity in the material universe is ascribed to his
or power, which pervades all creation. Whether the power is independent and treated as a separate person is not clear from the fragments that Eusebius[32] has preserved for us. Aristobulus was only one link in a continuous chain, though his is the only name among Philo's predecessors that has come down to us. Philo speaks, fifteen times in all, of explanations of allegorists who read into the Bible this or that system of thought[33] regarding the words of the law as "manifest symbols of things invisible and hints of things inexpressible." And if their work were [pg.39] before us, it is likely that Philo would appear as the central figure of an Alexandrian Midrash gathered from many sources, instead of the sole authority for a vast development of the Torah. We must not regard him as a single philosophical genius who suddenly springs up, but as the culmination of a long development, the supreme master of an old tradition.
If the allegorical method appears now as artificial and frigid, it must be remembered that it was one which recommended itself strongly to the age. The great creative era of the Greek mind had passed away with the absorption of the city-state in Alexander's empire. Then followed the age of criticism, during which the works of the great masters were interpreted, annotated, and compared. Next, as creative thought became rarer, and confidence in human reason began to be shaken, men fell back more and more for their ideas and opinions upon some authority of the distant past, whom they regarded as an inspired teacher. The sayings of Homer and Pythagoras were considered as divinely revealed truths; and when treated allegorically, they were shown to contain the philosophical tenets of the Platonic, the Aristotelian, or the Stoic school. Thus, in the first century B.C.E., the Greek mind, which had earlier been devoted to the free search for knowledge and truth, was approaching the Hebraic standpoint, which considered that the highest truth had once for all been revealed to mankind in inspired writings, and that the duty of later generations was to interpret this revealed doctrine rather than [pg.40] search independently for knowledge. On the other hand, the Jewish interpreters were trying to reach the Greek standpoint when they set themselves to show that the writers of the Bible had anticipated the philosophers of Hellas with systems of theology, psychology, ethics, and cosmology. Allegorism, it may be said, is the instrument by which Greek and Hebrew thought were brought together. Its development was in its essence a sign of intellectual vigor and religious activity; but in the time of Philo it threatened to have one evil consequence, which did in the end undermine the religion of the Alexandrian community. Some who allegorized the Torah were not content with discovering a deeper meaning beneath the law, but went on to disregard the literal sense, i.e., they allegorized away the law, and held in contempt the symbolic observance to which they had attached a spiritual meaning. On the other hand, there was a party which adhered strictly to the literal sense
and rejected allegorism.[34] Philo protested against these extremes and was the leader of those who were liberal in thought and conservative in practice, and who venerated the law both for its literal and for its allegorical sense. To effect the true harmony between the literal and the allegorical sense of the Torah, between the spiritual and the legal sides of Judaism, between Greek philosophy and revealed religion—that was the great work of Philo-Judæus. [pg.41] Though the religious and intellectual development of the Alexandrian community proceeded on different lines from that of the main body of the nation in Palestine, yet the connection between the two was maintained closely for centuries. The colony, as we have noticed, recognized whole-heartedly the spiritual headship of Jerusalem, and at the great festivals of the year a deputation went from Alexandria to the holy sanctuary, bearing offerings from the whole community. In Jerusalem, on the other hand, special synagogues, where Greek was the language,[35] were built for Alexandrian visitors. Alexandrian artisans and craftsmen took part in the building of Herod's temple, but were found inferior to native workmen.[36] The notices within the building were written in Greek as well as in Aramaic, and the golden gates to the inner court were, we are told by Josephus,[37] the gift of Philo's brother, the head of the Alexandrian community. Some fragments have come down to us of a poem about Jerusalem in Greek verse by a certain Philo, who lived in the first century B.C.E., and was perhaps an ancestor of our worthy. He glorifies the Holy City, extols its fertility, and speaks of its ever-flowing waters beneath the earth. His greater namesake says that wherever the Jews live they consider Jerusalem as their metropolis. The Talmud again [pg.42] tells how Judah Ben Tabbai and Joshua Ben Perahya, during the persecution of the Pharisees by Hyreanus, fled to Alexandria, and how later Joshua Ben Hanania[38] sojourned there and gave answers to twelve questions which the Jews propounded to him, three of them dealing with "the Wisdom." The Talmud has frequent reference to Alexandrian Jews, and that it makes little direct mention of the Alexandrian exegesis is explained by the distrust of the whole Hellenistic movement, which the rise of Christianity and the growth of Gnosticism induced in the rabbis of the second and third centuries. They lived at a time when it had been proved that that movement led away from Judaism, and its main tenets had been adopted or perverted by an antagonistic creed. It was a tragic necessity which compelled the severance between the Eastern and Western developments of the religion. In Philo's day the breach was already threatened, through the anti-legal tendencies of the extreme allegorists. His own aim was to maintain the catholic tradition of Judaism, while at the same time expounding the Torah according to the conceptions of ancient philosophy. Unfortunately, the balance was not preserved by those who followed him, and the branch of Judaism that had blossomed forth so fruitfully fell off from the parent tree. But till the middle of the first century of the common era the Alexandrian and the Palestinian developments of Jewish [pg.43] culture were complementary: on the one side there was legal, on the other, philosophical expansion. Moreover, the Judæo-Alexandrian school, though, through its abandonment of the Hebrew tongue, it lies outside the main stream of Judaism, was an immense force in the religious history of the world, and Philo, its greatest figure, stands out in our annals as the embodiment of the Jewish religious mission, which is to preach to the nations the knowledge of the one God, and the law of righteousness. [pg.44]