This was an important line to take, and it differed in principle from the allegorical method adopted by the Eastern Jews. Not only the Dorshey Reshumoth, [160] or searches out of the subleties of Scripture, of their indications, but even the ordinary Haggadist employed, indeed, allegoric interpretations. Thereby Akiba vindicated for the Song of Songs' its place in the Canon. Did not Scripture say: One thing spake God, twofold is what I heard,' [161] and did not this imply a twofold meaning; nay, could not the Torah be explained by many different methods? [162] What, for example, was the water which Israel sought in the wilderness, or the bread and raiment which Jacob asked in Bethel, but the Torah and the dignity which it conferred? But in all these, and innumerable similar instances, the allegorical interpretation was only an application of Scripture for homiletical purposes, not a searching into a rationale beneath, such as that of the Hellenists. The latter the Rabbis would have utterly repudiated, on their express principle that Scripture goes not beyond its plain meaning.' [163] They sternly insisted, that we ought not to search into the ulterior object and rationale of a law, but simply obey it. But it was this very rationale of the Law which the Alexandrians sought to find under its letter. It was in this sense that Aristobulus, a Hellenist Jew of Alexandria, [164] sought to explain Scripture. Only a fragment of his work, which seems to have been a Commentary on the Pentateuch, dedicated to King Ptolemy (Philometor), has been preserved to us (by Clement of Alexandria, and by Eusebius [165] ). According to Clement of Alexandria, his aim was, to bring the Peripatetic philosophy out of the law of Moses, and out of the other prophets.' Thus, when we read that God stood, it meant the stable order of the world; that He created the world in six days, the orderly succession of time; the rest of the Sabbath, the preservation of what was created. And in such manner could the whole system of Aristole be found in the Bible. But how was this to be accounted for? Of course, the Bible had not learned from Aristole, but he and all the other philosphers had learned from the Bible. Thus, according to Aristobulus, Pythagoras, Plato, and all the other sages had really learned from Moses, and the broken rays found in their writings were united in all their glory in the Torah.
It was a tempting path on which to enter, and one on which there was no standing still. It only remained to give fixedness to the allegorical method by reducing it to certain principles, or canons of criticism, and to form the heterogeneous mass of Grecian philosophemes and Jewish theologumena into a compact, if not homogeneous system. This was the work of Philo of Alexandria, born about 20 b.c. It concerns us not here to inquire what were the intermediate links between Aristobulus and Philo. Another and more important point claims our attention. If ancient Greek philosophy knew the teaching of Moses, where was the historic evidence for it? If such did not exist, it must somehow be invented. Orpheus was a name which had always lent itself to literary fraud, [166] and so Aristobulus boldly produces (whether of his own or of others' making) a number of spurious citations from Hesiod, Homer, Linus, but especially from Orpheus, all Biblical and Jewish in their cast. Aristobulus was neither the first nor the last to commit such fraud. The Jewish Sibyl boldly, and, as we shall see, successfully personated the heathen oracles. And this opens, generally, quite a vista of Jewish-Grecia literature. In the second, and even in the third century before Christ, there were Hellenist historians, such as Eupolemus, Artapanus, Demetrius, and Aristeas; tragic and epic poets, such as Ezekiel, Pseudo-Philo, and Theodotus, who, after the manner of the ancient classical writers, but for their own purposes, described certain periods of Jewish history, or sang of such themes as the Exodus, Jerusalem, or the rape of Dinah.