Philo did have a specific lens through which he read his ancestral
Scriptures. It was captured in antiquity by thebon mot:“Either Plato
philonizes or Philo platonizes” (Jerome,On Famous Men11). Philo’s task
may have been to interpret Moses, but the Moses he read was a Platonized
Moses. Unlike a number of Jews and later Christians who constructed a
history of culture in which they subordinated Hellenistic thought to Jew-
ish thought by making the “theft of philosophy” argument, Philo, who
knew the argument and referred to it on occasion, appears to have believed
that Moses and Plato had seen the same realities. Philo did not believe that
he needed to read Plato into Moses, but out of Moses. For example, he ar-
gued that the “pattern of the tent” that Moses saw before he constructed
the Tabernacle demonstrated the presence of Platonic ideas (Exod. 25:9, 40
inMoses2.74, 76; Exod. 25:9 inQE2.52; Exod. 25:40 inQE2.82; and Exod.
26:30 inQE2.90). It was from such a perspective that he interwove Plato’s
Timaeusinto his treatises, especiallyCreationand theAllegorical Interpre-
tations1–3.
This does not mean that Philo was a Platonist; he was not if we under-
stand him on his own terms. Nor does it mean that he restricted his philo-
sophical lens to Platonism; he did not. Like most Hellenistic thinkers, he
was eclectic. For thinkers like Antiochus of Ascalon, Eudorus, Arius
Didymus, and many others, different systems of thought contributed to
the understanding of reality. The best course of action was to draw the best
from each tradition, even if a single tradition served as the overarching
Weltanschauung.Philo falls easily into this perspective. He incorporated
into his treatises not only Middle Platonic perspectives but also Stoic and
Neopythagorean ones. Stoicism was the common coin of the Hellenistic
and Roman worlds. Philo drew from a significant number of Stoic con-
cepts, including cosmological, anthropological, and ethical views. His ar-
guments for providence are largely Stoic. Similarly, he adopted Neo-
pythagorean arithmology. His basic frame of thought was Platonic, but
this was not an exclusive commitment for him.
Assessments of his contribution have been extreme. H. A. Wolfson
thought that he created the system of thought that became the basis for
medieval philosophy and theology until Spinoza deconstructed it. On the
other end of the spectrum, Richard Goulet considered him to be a hack
who spoiled a far more brilliant allegorical commentary on the entire Pen-
tateuch. Most scholars fall between these two poles in their assessment, al-
though there is no unanimity on specifics. One critical area where Philo
did make a lasting contribution was in theology proper: he considered283PhiloEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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