To begin with, Philo united in rare measure Greek learning with Jewish enthusiasm. In his writings he very frequently uses classical modes of expression; [175] he names not fewer than sixty-four Greek writers; [176] and he either alludes to, or quotes frequently from, such sources as Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Solon, the great Greek tragedians, Plato, and others. But to him these men were scarcely heathen.' He had sat at their feet, and learned to weave a system from Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The gatherings of these philosophers were holy,' and Plato was the great.' But holier than all was the gathering of the true Israel; and incomparably greater than any, Moses. From him had all sages learned, and with him alone was all truth to be found - not, indeed, in the letter, but under the letter, of Holy Scripture. If in Numb. xxiii. 19 we read God is not a man,' and in Deut. i. 31 that the Lord was as a man,' did it not imply, on the one hand, the revelation of absolute truth by God, and, on the other, accommodation to those who were weak? Here, then, was the principle of a twofold interpretation of the Word of God - the literal and the allegorical. The letter of the text must be held fast; and Biblical personages and histories were real. But only narrow-minded slaves of the letter would stop here; the more so, as sometimes the literal meaning alone would be tame, even absurd; while the allegorical interpretation gave the true sense, even though it might occassionally run counter to the letter. Thus, the patriarchs represented states of the soul; and, whatever the letter might bear, Joseph represented one given to the fleshly, whom his brothers rightly hated; Simeon the soul aiming after the higher; the killing of the Egyptian by Moses, the subjugation of passion, and so on. But this allegorical interpretation - by the side of the literal (the Peshat of the Palestinians) - though only for the few, was not arbitrary. It had its laws,' and canons' - some of which excluded the literal interpretation, while others admitted it by the side of the higher meaning. [177]
To begin with the former: the literal sense must be wholly set aside, when it implied anything unworthy of the Deity, anything unmeaning, impossible, or contrary to reason. Manifestly, this canon, if strictly applied, would do away not only with all anthropomorphisms, but cut the knot wherever difficulties seemed insuperable. Again, Philo would find an allegorical, along with the literal, interpretation indicated in the reduplication of a word, and in seemingly superfluous words, particles, or expressions. [178] These could, of course, only bear such a meaning on Philo's assumption of the actual inspiration of the LXX. version. Similarly, in exact accordance with a Talmudical canon, [179] any repetition of what had been already stated would point to something new. These were comparatively sober rules of exegesis. Not so the licence which he claimed of freely altering the punctuation [180] of sentences, and his notion that, if one from among several synonymous words was chosen in a passage, this pointed to some special meaning attaching to it. Even more extravagant was the idea, that a word which occurred in the LXX. might be interpreted according to every shade of meaning which it bore in the Greek, and that even another meaning might be given it by slightly altering the letters. However, like other of Philo's allegorical canons, these were also adopted by the Rabbis, and Haggadic interpretations were frequently prefaced by: Read not thus - but thus.' If such violence might be done to the text, we need not wonder at interpretations based on a play upon words, or even upon parts of a word. Of course, all seemingly strange or peculiar modes of expression, or of designation, occurring in Scripture, must have their special meaning, and so also every particle, adverb, or preposition. Again, the position of a verse, its succession by another, the apparently unaccountable presence or absence of a word, might furnish hints for some deeper meaning, and so would an unexpected singular for a plural, or vice versâ, the use of a tense, even the gender of a word. Most serious of all, an allegorical interpretation might be again employed as the basis of another. [181]