On the Creation of the World
Peri tēs kata Mōusea kosmopoiias
Moses was the first and greatest philosopher, and Genesis, read allegorically through the categories of Platonic and Stoic thought, teaches the same truths about God, the cosmos, and the soul that Greek philosophy reaches only imperfectly on its own.
- Moses as the first philosopher, read through Platonic categories
- allegorical interpretation of Genesis's creation account
- dependence on the Septuagint rather than the Hebrew text
- a method of scriptural allegory later inherited by Christian exegesis
A Greek-language philosophical commentary on the opening chapters of Genesis by a wealthy, Greek-educated Jewish leader of Alexandria's large diaspora community. Philo reads the six days of creation allegorically, treating the created world as patterned on an intelligible, incorporeal model, a reading that draws explicitly on Plato's theory of Forms and Stoic cosmology, and argues that Moses anticipated and surpassed the later Greek philosophers he is nonetheless read through. Working entirely from the Septuagint, since his Hebrew was limited, Philo pioneered a sustained method of allegorical scriptural interpretation that later shaped both rabbinic and, especially, Christian exegesis, above all through Alexandrian Christian theologians who inherited his interpretive habits directly.
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