goal,
piety, and humanity, or what the rabbis called charity ([Hebrew: tsdka]).
"He who loves God, but does not show love towards his own kind,
has but the half of virtue."[155] Thus in one and the same age Hillel,
incited by a single scoffer, and Philo, moved by the taunts of a tribe
of anti-Semites, looked for the most vital lesson of the Torah, and
they found it alike in "the love of our neighbor." That was Judaism on
its practical side.

In order to show the humanitarian spirit of the Torah, Philo
emphasizes its socialistic institutions, the law of the seventh year's
rest to the land ([Hebrew: shnt hshmita]), of the emancipation of the
slaves, and of the Jubilee. These to him are not tribal laws, but the
ideal institutions for the whole world, which shall one day be set up
when the theocracy has been established over all mankind. And in an age
when slavery was as accepted a condition as factory-labor is to-day,
he ventured to assert the principle of the equality of man. "If,"
saith the law, "one of thy brethren be sold to thee, let him serve
thee for six years, and in the seventh year let him go free without
payment." And Philo thereon comments:[156] "A second time Moses calls
our fellow-creature brother, to impress upon the master that he has a
tie with his servant, so that he may not neglect him as a stranger.
Nay, but if he follows the direction of the law, he will feel sympathy
with him, and will not be vexed when he is about to liberate him. For
though we call our servants slaves, yet in verity they are only
dependents who serve us in order to have the means of life." This
corresponds with the Talmud dictum, "Whoever buys a Jewish slave buys
a master for himself."[157] Commenting again upon the verse in Exodus
xxi. 6, which says with seeming harshness that a servant who wishes to
stay with his master after the year of emancipation has arrived, shall
be nailed by the ear to a door, he explains that no man should consent
of his own will to be a slave, for we should only be servants of God;
and if a man deliberately rejects freedom for comfort, he should wear
a mark of degradation. The so-called Christian principle of the
dignity of human life and the equality of man, Philo shows to be the
spirit of the Mosaic law, not limited within the confines of one
nation, but valid for the world. Nor is it contained therein as a mere
sentimental aspiration, but it is realized in the institutions of the
Jewish polity.

Phi