Philo allegorizes Noah as "a man who worked the earth" (Genesis 9:20) into a treatise on the farming of the soul: cultivating virtue, pruning vice, and bridling the passions.
On Husbandry is one of Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch, taking as its starting text Genesis 9:20-21: "Noah began to be a man who worked the earth, and he planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine and became drunk in his house." Philo opens by distinguishing the expert farmer from the mere unskilled laborer of the soil, then transposes that distinction onto ethics: the true farmer of the soul plants only fruitful growths (education, virtue) and uproots the unfruitful and destructive ones (folly, pleasure, anger, injustice). He works through a sequence of biblical texts read as coded instruction for moral self-cultivation, including the law of not cutting down fruit trees in siege warfare (Deuteronomy 20:20), which he reads as an allegory of the liberal arts serving as a defensive fence around ethics and natural philosophy.
A large stretch of the work turns to the Song at the Sea and the figure of the horse and rider drowned in Exodus, which Philo reads as the passions (the horse) and the vice-loving mind (the rider) being destroyed together. From there he digresses at length on horse-breeding and horsemanship as a moral allegory for the discipline needed to control the soul's irrational impulses, tying this to Moses's blessing of Dan as "a serpent on the road" (Genesis 49:17), which Philo interprets as the discerning, self-defending judgment of the soul, contrasted with the seductive serpent of Eden. The treatise closes by returning to Noah's own limitation: scripture says only that he "began" to be a farmer, not that he reached the furthest limits of the art, and Philo uses this to discuss involuntary lapses, the vow that can be broken by sudden unforeseen circumstance (Numbers 6), and the difficulty of running the whole race of life without stumbling.
The work matters as a compact example of Philo's method: he treats a terse narrative verse as a repository of ethical and psychological instruction, using etymology (Dan as "judgment"), agricultural and equestrian imagery, and cross-references throughout the Pentateuch to build a sustained allegory of moral self-governance. It is a good entry point for readers curious how a Hellenized Jewish philosopher in first-century Alexandria could turn a two-verse story about a drunk vintner into a full ethics of cultivating the soul.
“"And Noah began to be a man who worked the earth, and he planted a vineyard, and he drank of the wine and became drunk in his house" (Genesis 9:20–21).”
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“Beyond this one should also consider that the hired laborer of the soil, looking to a single end—his wage, since he works for pay in almost every case—has no concern at all for working well”
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“the ancients say that they likened the threefold discourse of philosophy to a farm: its natural-philosophy part they compared to trees and plants, its ethical part to the fruits for whose sake the plants exist, and its logical part to the fence and enclosure around it.”
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“Dan is translated "judgment." The power of the soul that examines and scrutinizes and discriminates and, in a manner of speaking, sits in judgment on each thing, he likened to a serpent”
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“was too weak to come all the way to its furthest limits; for it is said that "he began to be a farmer of the earth," not that he attained the boundaries of the highest expertise.”
— On Husbandry · read this chapter →
It is an allegorical commentary on Genesis 9:20, where Noah is called a man who "worked the earth" and planted a vineyard. Philo turns the literal farmer's skill into a metaphor for cultivating virtue in the soul, discussing what to plant (education, good habits) and what to cut away (vice, passion).
He is allegorizing Exodus 15's drowned "horse and rider": the horse represents the passions and the rider the mind that indulges them. From there he digresses on the real skill of horsemanship as an image for the discipline needed to control one's own irrational impulses.
In Genesis 49:17 Jacob blesses Dan as "a serpent on the road." Philo notes Dan means "judgment" and reads the serpent as the soul's discerning, self-defending power, contrasting it with the deceptive serpent that tempted Eve.
Only partly. Philo stresses that scripture says Noah merely "began" to be a farmer, not that he mastered the art, and uses this to discuss how even righteous people can fall short and suffer involuntary lapses.
Philo reads Deuteronomy 20:20's ban on destroying fruit trees during a siege as an image for the liberal arts (logic, rhetoric, geometry) forming a protective fence around the more essential pursuits of ethics and natural philosophy.
Allegorical Interpretation I · Allegorical Interpretation II · Allegorical Interpretation III · Every Good Man is Free · Flaccus · On Abraham · On Dreams · On Drunkenness · On Flight and Finding · On Joseph · On Mating / Preliminary Studies · On Noah's Work as a Planter