Philo's allegorical treatise reading Hagar's flight from Sarah (Genesis 16) as a study of why souls flee, what they seek, and what it means to truly find.
On Flight and Finding is one of Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentaries on Genesis, taking as its starting text the episode where Sarah mistreats Hagar and Hagar flees into the wilderness, only to be found by an angel at a spring. Philo reads this narrative not as history but as a coded account of the soul's psychology: Hagar stands for the soul still attached to preliminary learning (encyclical education), while Sarah represents virtue itself, and the flight and return trace the soul's relationship to lower and higher forms of knowledge.
Philo opens by proposing that all flight has three causes -- hatred, fear, and shame -- and finds biblical exemplars for each, most extensively Jacob's flight from Laban (hatred) and from Esau (fear). He then works through the story point by point: why Hagar flees, why the angel finds her at a well rather than in a city, and what it means that she is told to return and submit rather than to keep running. Wells and springs recur as Philo's central image for the search after wisdom -- some people, he argues, neither seek nor find; others seek and find; others find without having sought, or seek without finding, and Scripture supposedly names each type through the different water-sources and wells dug by the patriarchs.
The treatise matters because it shows Philo's exegetical method at full stretch: a minor, almost embarrassing domestic episode in Genesis becomes the occasion for a sustained meditation on self-knowledge, the limits of "preliminary studies," and the difference between fleeing one's own faults (which he condemns) and fleeing toward God (which he praises). It is a clear window into how an educated Hellenistic Jew fused Stoic and Platonic categories with a close, word-by-word reading of the Hebrew Bible in Greek translation, well before the New Testament's own allegorical and typological reading habits took shape.
“I myself think there are three causes of flight: hatred, fear, and shame.”
— On Flight and Finding · read this chapter →
“The practicer Jacob, at any rate, flees his father-in-law Laban out of hatred, and his brother Esau out of fear”
— On Flight and Finding · read this chapter →
“Whoever, then, flees for refuge — that is, whoever blames not himself but God for his sins — let him be punished, being deprived of the altar”
— On Flight and Finding · read this chapter →
“he introduces some who neither seek nor find anything, others who succeed at both, and some who have gained one but not the other”
— On Flight and Finding · read this chapter →
“For to free souls — truly free, truly citizen souls — he is a free and freedom-making craftsman, but to slaves he is a slave”
— On Flight and Finding · read this chapter →
It is an allegorical commentary on Genesis 16, where Hagar flees from Sarah's mistreatment and is found by an angel at a spring. Philo reads the episode as a psychological and philosophical study of why souls flee (hatred, fear, or shame) and what it means to seek and find wisdom.
Hagar represents the soul still attached to preliminary or encyclical education -- basic learning that prepares but does not itself constitute virtue -- while Sarah, her mistress, represents virtue itself.
Philo identifies three causes: hatred (as when spouses leave each other), fear (as when children or slaves leave those in power over them), and shame (as when friends part after wrongdoing). He illustrates each with biblical examples, especially Jacob fleeing Laban out of hatred and Esau out of fear.
In his reading of the wells dug by the patriarchs, Philo sorts seekers of wisdom into four types: those who neither seek nor find, those who both seek and find, those who find without seeking, and those who seek without finding, using different wells and cisterns in Genesis as symbols for each outcome.
He condemns this attitude sharply, saying that whoever 'blames not himself but God for his sins' should be barred from the altar of refuge, since that refuge is reserved for those who genuinely seek safety, not for those evading responsibility.
Allegorical Interpretation I · Allegorical Interpretation II · Allegorical Interpretation III · Every Good Man is Free · Flaccus · On Abraham · On Dreams · On Drunkenness · On Husbandry · On Joseph · On Mating / Preliminary Studies · On Noah's Work as a Planter