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 brought together. Its development was in
its essence a sign of intellectual vigor and religious activity; but
in the time of Philo it threatened to have one evil consequence, which
did in the end