The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory, with a General Bibliography of Philo

IN CODE 37

dened with every sort of legal decision. He urged Moses to appoint
deputy justices who would relieve him of most of the cases while he re­
served the more important decisions for himself. Two parts of this
story stand out as Philo here interprets it, the actual advice Jethro gave,
and the fact that he left his own flocks to come to see Moses. Philo

makes the following deductions:

The great man [Moses] accepts all he advises, and enacts that it is suitable

that smaller legal claims be assigned to smaller [officials], the great claims to

greater officials.^64 And frequendy the wiseacre [Jethro] changes and goes

over from the flock of which, blind as he was, he had received the leadership:

he seeks out the divine herd and becomes no contemptible part of it, for he is

amazed at nature for her skill as a shepherd, and admires the authority which

she exercises in the care of her herd.^65

Jethro, still the Roman iuridicus, is thus the prototype of those men

who made the legal adjustment which recognized Jewish law in Alex­

andria. For by making Jethro's distinction, Romans could reserve for

themselves the more important matters and let Jews decide among

themselves the rest. The Roman officials who made this concession were

to Philo not "arrogant men," but men who represented the "pastoral

care of God." The coming of Jethro to Moses led Philo to add that

some, at least, of these officials were so impressed with the value of Jew­

ish law that they became "God-fearers." Such an attitude on the part of

Romans would not be anomalous, for there is mention in Acts x, 1,2 of

Cornelius, a Roman centurion at Caesarea, who was "a devout man,

and one that feared God with all his house, who gave much alms to the

poor and prayed always." Philo himself says of Petronius, the Roman

governor of Syria:

He had, as it appears, some sparks of the Jewish philosophy and piety: he

may have learned it long since, by reason of his zeal for education, or only

from the time when he assumed control of those regions of Asia and Syria

where Jews are populous in every city; or his soul may have been thus dis­

posed toward those things naturally worthy of attention by some spontaneous

and self-prompting and self-teaching inclination.^66

64. xal 6 M^Y<*S ndvxa Jteidaoxel, vouiaag dp^uSxxov slvai nixooig \ikv xd u,ixod,
    M-eyAXoi? bk xd \izyaka 6ixaia xMtecrfrai.


65. Mut., 104 £. In the last sentence Philo is identifying Moses' rule, and with it the Jewish
    administration of society, with the rule of nature. This passage, which bothered Colson (see his
    notes ad he), seems to me one of the very few in Philo's writings which he has misunder­
    stood.


66. Legat., 245.