In first-century Alexandria, some of the readers who scoffed at the Bible had been raised on it. Men brought up under the Law of Moses said the Tower of Babel was the same kind of fable as Homer's giants piling up mountains to reach heaven. Others read the Sabbath and circumcision as symbols of truths about the soul, and concluded that once the truth was understood, the practice could be dropped. Outsiders mocked circumcision itself. Philo of Alexandria spent his writing life answering all three. His answer was that the Law of Moses, read rightly, teaches what the best of Greek philosophy teaches, and that Moses taught it first.
He could make that claim because he stood in both worlds. He was born about 20 BCE into one of the richest Jewish families in the city. His brother Alexander, the alabarch, or chief customs official, paid for the gold and silver on nine gates of the Temple in Jerusalem, and Philo went to that Temple at least once, to pray and to sacrifice. His schooling, though, was Greek: grammar, then geometry, then music, each of them, as he put it, a servant preparing him for philosophy. He read his Bible in the Greek translation called the Septuagint, and how much Hebrew he knew is still debated.
The tool that joined the two worlds was allegory, reading a story as a coded account of something else. In his long commentary on Genesis, Adam is the mind, Eve the senses, and the serpent pleasure. For the six days of creation he reached for Plato's Timaeus: God first conceives the world as a plan in his mind, then builds the visible world from it. That God lies beyond human knowing. Between him and the world stands the Logos, a Greek word meaning both word and reason. For Philo the Logos is what human minds can understand of God, and it is the power that divides the formless mass of things into opposed halves — hot and cold, day and night — and holds them in balance. Heraclitus had boasted of the unity of opposites as his own discovery; Moses, Philo replied, had taught it long before.
Yet he would not follow the allegorists who dropped the practice once they had the meaning. In On the Migration of Abraham he argued that the literal law stands to its meaning as the body to the soul, and that caring for the body keeps the soul alive.
He wanted leisure for this work and lost it. In the middle of On the Special Laws, his account of the Mosaic code for Greek readers, he complains that envy has dragged him from philosophy into the sea of public affairs. He names no event; the likeliest is 38 CE, the year a mob set up statues of the emperor Gaius in Alexandria's synagogues, drove the Jews into one quarter of the city and looted their homes, and thirty-eight members of the Jewish council of elders were flogged in the theatre. Philo blamed the Roman prefect, Flaccus, for handing the Jews over. When the community sent an embassy to Gaius in 39–40 CE, Philo led it, according to the Jewish historian Josephus. His own On the Embassy to Gaius shows an emperor who hurried the envoys from room to room of his villas giving orders about windows, asked why they did not eat pork, and dismissed them as more foolish than wicked for not believing he was a god.
The pull of Rome ran through his own family. In a dialogue that survives only in Armenian, Philo argues against his nephew Tiberius Julius Alexander, who held that animals can reason. Josephus wrote that this nephew did not keep his ancestral customs. He became prefect of Egypt in 66 CE and that year turned his legions on the Jews of Alexandria; in 70 he was second-in-command to Titus, the future emperor, at the siege of Jerusalem.
Philo died around 50 CE, and his books survived because Christians wanted them. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian teacher in the same city around 200 CE, took over his reading of Hagar, Abraham's servant, as the general learning that serves philosophy. Eusebius, the fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, catalogued his writings and took the Jewish ascetics of On the Contemplative Life for early Christian monks. Jewish tradition kept almost none of his thought. In 1575 Azariah dei Rossi, a Jewish scholar in Mantua, gave him four chapters of his Light of the Eyes, faulted him for reading the Torah in Greek and for allegorising too freely, and declined either to acquit or to convict him. In 1947 Harry Wolfson, a historian of philosophy at Harvard, argued that Philo founded the religious philosophy of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Scholars now place him among the Middle Platonists, the Platonists of the centuries around his own, and still argue over how original he was.