the limits of variety 177
by translators who should be regarded as ‘prophets and priests of the
mysteries, whose sincerity and singleness of thought has enabled them
to go hand in hand with the purest of spirits, the spirit of Moses’.^27
Philo was not the first or last Jew to base an idiosyncratic interpret-
ation of the Torah on explicit allegorizing. We have seen that the Yahad
sectarians, who asserted that the ‘real meaning’ of passages in Habak-
kuk or Nahum related to the history of their community, were doing
something very similar. We shall find a similar procedure occasionally in
early rabbinic Bible interpretation which may go back to the Second
Temple period (see Chapter 11). Nothing suggests that Philo was aware
either of the Jewish groups which produced these commentaries on
scripture or of the commentaries themselves. A few specific interpret-
ations of some texts did come through both to Philo and to the rabbis
from a common tradition. But Philo did not deal with specific legal
issues as the rabbis did. He showed rather a concern to demonstrate the
rationality of the laws and the excellence of their moral implications.
It would have been more likely for Philo to come into contact with
the writings of Aristobulus, a predecessor in Alexandria. Aristobulus
wrote philosophical interpretations of Moses’ teachings in the mid-
second century bce, asserting that ‘Plato followed the tradition of the
law that we use ... just as Pythagoras, having borrowed many of the
things in our traditions, found room for them in his own doctrinal sys-
tem.’ Aristobulus was at pains to insist that anthropomorphic references
to God in the biblical text must be read allegorically: ‘for what our
lawgiver Moses wishes to say, he does so at many levels, using words
that appear to have other referents (I mean to things that can be seen);
yet in doing so he actually speaks about “natural” conditions and struc-
tures of a higher order .. .’. Thus Aristobulus reassured his readers that
the Sabbath refers to the ‘sevenfold principle ... through which we have
knowledge of things both human and divine’. He appealed in support of
his interpretation to verses alleged to come from the Greek poets Hes-
iod, Homer and Linus, although some of these at least were pious Jewish
forgeries.^28
Aristobulus’ use of allegory seems to have differed from Philo’s only
in his lack of sophistication, and the two Jewish philosophers can be
seen to react to the same cultural milieu in Alexandria (albeit over a
chronological gap of a couple of centuries). But there is no strong rea-
son to view them as part of a distinctive school or tradition in the city,
for Philo did not apparently cite or refer to Aristobulus’ philosophy
anywhere in his voluminous works. On the other hand, allegorizing was