Allegorical Interpretation (Philo)
Philo's systematic allegorical reading of Genesis 2-3 in three books. Central to understanding how first-century Jews read Scripture philosophically — the method that influenced early Christian interpretation.
Translation: Loeb Classical Library (via Sefaria) (public-domain)
Overview
Allegorical Interpretation (Greek: Legum Allegoriae) is the longest surviving work of Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE - 50 CE) and the centerpiece of his allegorical commentary series on Genesis. Spanning three books, it provides a systematic philosophical reading of Genesis 2:1-3:19, interpreting the narrative of the Garden of Eden, the formation of man, the trees, the rivers, the serpent, and the fall as an extended allegory of the human soul's faculties, temptations, and potential for ascent toward God.
Philo treats the two accounts of human creation in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 as describing two different realities: the heavenly, ideal human being formed in God's image (representing pure intellect, nous) and the earthly, embodied human formed from the dust (representing the soul lodged in sensory matter). This Platonic dualism runs throughout the entire allegorical series and provides the conceptual scaffolding for most of Philo's biblical interpretation.
The Garden of Eden becomes, in Philo's reading, the human soul itself. The four rivers that flow from Eden correspond to the four cardinal virtues — prudence, courage, temperance, and justice — drawn directly from Plato's Republic and the Stoic ethical tradition. The trees represent principles of moral knowledge, and the serpent figures as the faculty of sensory pleasure that draws the soul away from reason toward passion and vice.
Central to Philo's entire theological project is the concept of the Logos — the divine Word or rational principle through which God creates and orders the world. In Allegorical Interpretation, the Logos functions as the intelligible world-pattern underlying the creation narrative and as the mediating principle between the transcendent God and embodied human souls. This work is the fullest expression of Philo's hermeneutical method, which reads every element of the narrative — names, numbers, actions, objects — as coded philosophical instruction about the soul's relationship to virtue, reason, and the divine.
- John 1:1-18 (Logos as creative divine principle)
- Genesis 2:4-3:24 (the primary text interpreted throughout)
- 1 Corinthians 15:45-49 (first and second Adam)
- Romans 5:12-21 (sin and the fall)
- Colossians 1:15-17 (Logos as image of God and creator)
- Hebrews 1:1-3 (Logos as sustainer of all things)
Philo wrote more surviving text than any other ancient Jewish author outside the Bible, yet he was virtually unknown to the rabbinic tradition and survived only because the early church valued his philosophical synthesis. Eusebius of Caesarea even suggested (implausibly) that Philo must have been a Christian.