He is said to have been the tutor of Ptolemy Philometor, and he must have written at the beginning of the first century B.C.E.  He dedicated to the king his “Exegesis of the Mosaic Law,” which was an attempt to reveal the teachings of the Peripatetic system, i.e., the philosophy of Aristotle, within the text of the Pentateuch.  All anthropomorphic expressions are explained away allegorically, and God’s activity in the material universe is ascribed to his [Greek:  Dunamis] or power, which pervades all creation.  Whether the power is independent and treated as a separate person is not clear from the fragments that Eusebius[32] has preserved for us.  Aristobulus was only one link in a continuous chain, though his is the only name among Philo’s predecessors that has come down to us.  Philo speaks, fifteen times in all, of explanations of allegorists who read into the Bible this or that system of thought[33] regarding the words of the law as “manifest symbols of things invisible and hints of things inexpressible.”  And if their work were before us, it is likely that Philo would appear as the central figure of an Alexandrian Midrash gathered from many sources, instead of the sole authority for a vast development of the Torah.  We must not regard him as a single philosophical genius who suddenly springs up, but as the culmination of a long development, the supreme master of an old tradition.

If the allegorical method appears now as artificial and frigid, it must be remembered that it was one which recommended itself strongly to the age.  The great creative era of the Greek mind had passed away with the absorption of the city-state in Alexander’s empire.  Then followed the age of criticism, during which the works of the great masters were interpreted, annotated, and compared.  Next, as creative thought became rarer, and confidence in human reason began to be shaken, men fell back more and more for their ideas and opinions upon some authority of the distant past, whom they regarded as an inspired teacher.  The sayings of Homer and Pythagoras were considered as divinely revealed truths; and when treated allegorically, they were shown to contain the philosophical tenets of the Platonic, the Aristotelian, or the Stoic school.  Thus, in the first century B.C.E., the Greek mind, which had earlier been devoted to the free search for knowledge and truth, was approaching the Hebraic standpoint, which considered that the highest truth had once for all been revealed to mankind in inspired writings, and that the duty of later generations was to interpret this revealed doctrine rather than search independently for knowledge.  On the other hand, the Jewish interpreters were trying to reach the Greek standpoint when they set themselves to show that the writers of the Bible had anticipated the philosophers of Hellas with systems of theology, psychology, ethics, and cosmology.  Allegorism, it may be said, is the instrument by which Greek and Hebrew thought were