Philo's line-by-line allegory of Genesis 2:1-17, reading the six days, Eden, the two trees, and Adam's breath as a map of mind, soul, and virtue.
Allegorical Interpretation I is the opening book of Philo of Alexandria's running philosophical commentary on Genesis, covering the second creation account from the completion of heaven and earth (Gen. 2:1) through God's warning that Adam will "die by death" if he eats from the tree of knowledge (Gen. 2:17). Philo, a Jewish philosopher writing in Greek in first-century Alexandria, treats the text not as history but as a coded description of the human soul and its faculties, read through the lens of Stoic and Platonic philosophy.
Philo opens by explaining why the six days of creation cannot mean literal days -- time itself is a product of the created world, so it could not have preceded it -- and instead reads "six" and "seven" as expressions of mathematical perfection, tracing the number seven through planets, human gestation, bodily organs, and even grammar to show nature's fondness for it. He then turns to the forming of man from dust and the divine breath (Gen. 2:7), distinguishing a "heavenly man" made after God's image from an "earthly man" of corruptible matter, and analyzing the breath as an act in which God, the mind, and the breath itself are three distinct things. The planting of paradise becomes an allegory for God implanting virtue in the soul; the tree of life is generic virtue itself, planted at the center and commanding the particular virtues on either side; the tree of knowledge of good and evil represents the intermediate, self-determining faculty by which the soul chooses. The book closes on the paradox of the death sentence for eating the forbidden tree -- Adam does not die physically, so Philo distinguishes ordinary death (soul separating from body) from the death of the soul entombed in vice, citing Heraclitus's saying that "we live their death, and we have died their life" as unwitting confirmation of Moses's teaching.
The work matters as one of the earliest surviving examples of sustained philosophical allegoresis applied to a biblical text, a method that would deeply influence Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and the wider Christian exegetical tradition, and it shows a Hellenized Jewish thinker treating Moses as a philosopher whose teaching anticipates and outranks Greek sages like Heraclitus.
“So it is true, as the saying goes, that nothing that comes to be truly dies, but each thing, being separated one from another, displays a different form.”
— Allegorical Interpretation I · read this chapter →
“There are two kinds of men: the one is the heavenly man, the other the earthly.”
— Allegorical Interpretation I · read this chapter →
“The tree of life is the most generic virtue, which some call goodness, from which the particular virtues are constituted.”
— Allegorical Interpretation I · read this chapter →
“We live their death, and we have died their life”
— Allegorical Interpretation I · read this chapter →
It is Philo of Alexandria's philosophical commentary on Genesis 2:1-17, treating the six days of creation, the forming of Adam, and the garden of Eden not as history but as an allegory of the human mind, soul, and the acquisition of virtue. It is the first installment of a longer running commentary that continues through later books.
He argues that time is itself a feature of the created world, so it could not have existed before the world to measure its making. Instead he reads six as a symbol of numerical perfection and seven as nature's favored number, tracing it through planets, bodily organs, and human development.
Philo distinguishes a heavenly man made after God's image, who has no share in corruptible matter, from an earthly man compacted from dust and destined for corruption. This pairing lets him read the single Adam of the biblical text as really describing two different aspects of human nature, mind versus body.
The tree of life, planted at the center of paradise, stands for generic virtue or goodness, the source from which the particular virtues grow. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents the intermediate, self-determining faculty of the soul by which good and bad choices become possible.
Philo distinguishes two kinds of death: the natural death in which soul separates from body, and a punitive death in which the soul itself becomes entombed in vice while the body still lives. He supports this with Heraclitus's saying that people live another's death and die another's life.
Yes. He cites Heraclitus's aphorism on the soul being dead while entombed in the body as a case of Greek philosophy unconsciously echoing a teaching he says Moses had already stated.
Allegorical Interpretation II · Allegorical Interpretation III · Every Good Man is Free · Flaccus · On Abraham · On Dreams · On Drunkenness · On Flight and Finding · On Husbandry · On Joseph · On Mating / Preliminary Studies · On Noah's Work as a Planter