Biblexika

On the Life of Moses (Philo)

jewishgreek~20-50 CE

Philo's two-book account of Moses as king, lawgiver, priest, and prophet — the ideal leader combining political authority with divine wisdom. Includes the origin of the Septuagint.

Translation: Loeb Classical Library (via Sefaria) (public-domain)

Overview

On the Life of Moses (Greek: De Vita Mosis) is Philo of Alexandria's most accessible and comprehensive work, a two-book biographical account of Moses addressed explicitly to Greek-speaking readers who may be unfamiliar with the Hebrew Scriptures. Unlike Philo's more technical allegorical commentaries, this treatise presents Moses as a historical figure of universal significance — the greatest king, lawgiver, priest, and prophet the world has ever known — whose life and legislation speak to the universal human aspiration for wisdom, justice, and divine communion.

Philo structures Moses's greatness around four offices: king, philosopher-lawgiver, high priest, and prophet. This fourfold schema is itself a philosophical construction: these are the offices that represent, respectively, the political, legislative, ritual, and revelatory dimensions of Moses's unique relationship to God and his unique service to humanity. Together they constitute a portrait of the ideal human mediator between the divine and the human realms.

The treatise served multiple purposes simultaneously: it was an apologetic work demonstrating the philosophical respectability of Jewish Scripture to educated Gentile readers; a pedagogical work providing Alexandrian Jewish readers with a philosophically elevated understanding of their own tradition's founding figure; and an argument for the universal significance of Moses's legislation as the most perfectly rational expression of natural law ever codified. Its influence on early Christian apologetics, biblical typology, and theological reflection on Moses's prophetic role was enormous.

Bible connections
  • Exodus 2-40 (the primary narrative covered across both books)
  • Deuteronomy 34:10-12 (Moses as incomparable prophet)
  • John 5:46 (Moses as prophetic pointer to Christ)
  • Matthew 17:1-8 (Transfiguration and Moses's prophetic significance)
  • Acts 7:20-44 (Stephen's speech covering the Moses narrative)
  • Hebrews 3:1-6 (Moses's faithfulness as servant in God's house)
  • Hebrews 8:1-5 (Tabernacle as shadow of the heavenly sanctuary)
Key terms
Fourfold office– Philo's organizational schema presenting Moses as simultaneously king, lawgiver, high priest, and prophet — the four forms of human authority and divine mediation that Moses uniquely combined
Septuagint– the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, traditionally attributed to seventy (or seventy-two) translators; Philo's account of its inspired origin in De Vita Mosis II is the most important ancient Jewish testimony to the divine authority of the Greek Torah
Encomium– a formal literary praise of a great person, cataloging virtues and achievements; the genre in which Philo casts the Moses biography, making Moses legible to Greek-educated readers
Tabernacle allegory– Philo's interpretation of every element of Moses's portable sanctuary as a symbol of the corresponding element of the cosmos, a reading that directly influenced the argument of Hebrews 8-9
Did you know?

Philo's account of the Septuagint translation in On the Life of Moses II — in which seventy-two translators working independently produced identical renderings — is the most important ancient Jewish testimony to the divine inspiration of the Greek Old Testament, and it directly influenced how the early church defended the authority of its Greek Scriptures. This tradition of the miraculous translation was itself drawn from the earlier Letter of Aristeas, which Philo embellished significantly.