from the Greek
word [Greek: homilia], "an assembly," and a homily was a discourse
delivered to an assembly. The Meturgeman of Palestine and Babylon, who
expounded the Hebrew text in Aramaic, became the preacher of
Alexandria, who gave, in Greek, of course, homiletical expositions of
the law. In the great synagogue each Sabbath some leader in the
community would give a harangue to the assembly, starting from a
Biblical text and deducing from it or weaving into it the ideas of
Hellenic wisdom, touched by Jewish influence; for the synagogues at
Alexandria as elsewhere were the schools (_Schule_) as much as the
houses of prayer; schools, as Philo says, of "temperance, bravery,
prudence, justice, piety, holiness, and in short of all virtues by
which things human and Divine are well ordered."[29] He speaks
repeatedly of the Sabbath gatherings, when the Jews would become, as
he puts it, a community of philosophers,[30] as they listened to the
exegesis of the preacher, who by allegorical and homiletical fancies
would make a verse or chapter of the Torah live again with a new
meaning to his audience. The Alexandrian Jews, though the form of
their writing was influenced by the Greeks, probably brought with them
from Palestine primitive traces of allegorism. Allegory and its
counterpart, allegorical interpretation, are deeply imbedded in the
Oriental mind, and we hear of ancient schools of symbolists in the
oldest portions of the Talmud.[31] At what period the Alexandrians
began to use allegorical interpretation for the purpose of harmonizing
Greek ideas with the Bible we do not know, but the first writer in
this style of whom we have record (though scholars consider that his
fragments are of doubtful authenticity) is Aristobulus. 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