Philo's second treatise on dream-visions in Genesis, allegorizing Jacob's ladder and Joseph's dreams as maps of the soul's ascent and its temptations.
On Dreams is the surviving portion of a two-book Philonic treatise on the dreams recorded in Genesis; Philo opens by recalling that the earlier treatise covered "God-sent dreams" sent directly by the divine, while this one addresses a second class of dream in which the human mind, moved along with the mind of the universe, is carried by God toward foreknowledge. He works through Jacob's dream of the ladder at Bethel, then digresses at length on the well at which Jacob meets Rachel, treating the well as a symbol of hard-won knowledge and the crafts that must be dug out like water from deep ground. From there he turns to Jacob's dealings with Laban's flocks -- the white-spotted, speckled, and ash-sprinkled offspring -- reading the livestock markings as stages of the soul's training, and connects the imagery to Bezalel the embroiderer and the vestments of the high priest, who mediates between the cosmos as God's greater temple and the rational soul as God's lesser one.
The treatise's second half moves to Joseph, first as a dreamer of grand rustic and celestial visions and then, more critically, as a figure of the "statesman" type Philo views with deep suspicion -- vain, wind-inflated, prone to the arrogance of political ambition. Philo reads the sheaves and stars bowing to Joseph as symbols of a soul that mistakes worldly preeminence for real substance, contrasting this counterfeit rise with the genuine ascent modeled by Jacob's ladder. The closing sections turn to the butler's and baker's dreams before Pharaoh and to Pharaoh's own dreams of cattle and grain, using them to meditate on divine governance of the cosmos versus human claims to self-rule, and on the Nile as a figure for a life of bodily pleasure set against rivers that figure the virtuous life.
The work matters as a sustained example of Philo's allegorical method applied to an entire narrative arc rather than isolated verses: nearly every physical detail in the Genesis dream-narratives -- ladder, well, coat colors, sheaves, cattle, a river's "lips" -- becomes a term in a psychological and cosmological argument about how the soul rises toward or falls away from God, making it a key primary source for how a Hellenized Jewish exegete before Paul's generation could turn scripture into philosophy.
“The second class is that in which our own mind, moved along with the mind of the universe, seems to be possessed and carried by God, so that it becomes capable of anticipating and foreknowing”
— On Dreams · read this chapter →
“To me, then, the well seems to be a symbol of knowledge; for its nature is not superficial but very deep, nor does it lie open in plain view”
— On Dreams · read this chapter →
“These three signs — the white-spotted, the speckled, and the ashen-sprinkled — appear imperfect in the one still in training, who is not yet perfect; but in the perfect man they themselves appear perfect as well.”
— On Dreams · read this chapter →
“For there are, it seems, two temples of God: one is this universe, in which the high priest is his firstborn, the divine Logos; the other is the rational soul”
— On Dreams · read this chapter →
“For our present concern is not really a study about rivers, but about lives that are compared to the streams of rivers, opposed to one another.”
— On Dreams · read this chapter →
It is the second of a two-book treatise on the dreams recorded in Genesis, covering Jacob's ladder, Jacob's dealings with Laban's marked flocks, Joseph's dreams of sheaves and stars, and the butler's, baker's, and Pharaoh's dreams. Philo allegorizes each dream's imagery to argue about the soul's rise toward God or its fall into vanity.
He treats the ladder-vision at Bethel as an image of the soul's ascent, and spends a large digression on the nearby well Jacob encounters, reading the well as a symbol of knowledge that must be dug out with effort rather than knowledge that lies open on the surface.
Philo reads Joseph's dreams of sheaves and stars bowing to him as the ambition of the political "statesman" type, a soul inflated with empty pride rather than one genuinely ascending toward virtue, contrasting this counterfeit rise with Jacob's real one.
He names the cosmos itself as God's greater temple, served by the divine Logos as firstborn high priest, and the individual rational soul as the lesser temple, served by whoever is truly virtuous -- a key statement of his Logos theology.
Yes, the later sections take up the butler's and baker's dreams and Pharaoh's dreams of cattle and grain, using them to argue about divine governance of the cosmos against creatures who wrongly imagine themselves self-governing.
Allegorical Interpretation I · Allegorical Interpretation II · Allegorical Interpretation III · Every Good Man is Free · Flaccus · On Abraham · On Drunkenness · On Flight and Finding · On Husbandry · On Joseph · On Mating / Preliminary Studies · On Noah's Work as a Planter