Philo's closing treatise on the Mosaic law, reading the blessings and curses of Leviticus/Deuteronomy as literal national fortunes and allegorical states of the soul.
On Rewards and Punishments is the final treatise in Philo of Alexandria's exposition of the Mosaic law. Philo frames Moses' writings as falling into three parts — cosmology, history, and legislation — and this work completes the historical/legislative sequence by cataloguing the prizes God sets before virtue and the penalties he sets before vice, first for individuals, then for households and nations.
Philo works through a gallery of biblical figures as personifications of virtues rewarded: Enosh as the man who hopes in God, Enoch ("he was not found, because God moved him elsewhere") as repentance rewarded with solitude, Noah/Deucalion as justice rewarded with survival of the flood, and the patriarchal triad of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as faith, joy, and the vision of God won respectively through teaching, nature, and practice. Moses himself receives four crowns — kingship, legislation, prophecy, and the high priesthood — for piety. The second half turns to curses: Philo expands the covenant-curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 into vivid set-pieces on famine, plague, slavery, siege cannibalism, and the ruin of cities, before ending on national restoration — the promise that even exiles who repent will be gathered back and their land renewed.
The treatise matters as a hinge document: it shows a first-century Alexandrian Jewish philosopher reading Torah blessings and curses simultaneously as real political history (war, wealth, fertility, conquest) and as allegory of the soul's health or sickness (the soul "populous" with vices versus made a "pure virgin" that conceives virtues). That double register — literal covenant history plus psychological allegory — is Philo's signature method, and this work applies it to the sharpest test case: does God actually reward the just and punish the wicked, and on what timetable.
“The oracles given through the prophet Moses fall, as it happens, into three kinds: one concerns the making of the world, the second is historical, and the third is legislative.”
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“There, only the bodies of athletes fall, and these can easily be raised up again; but here whole lives fall, and once overturned they are scarcely able to be set upright again.”
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“He was not found, because God moved him elsewhere”
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“for men think death is the limit of punishments, but in the divine tribunal it is scarcely even the beginning.”
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“For virtue and the good are judged not by quantity but by quality; hence he reckoned that even a single day, lived rightly, is equal in worth to the whole good life of the wise man.”
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It is the closing treatise of Philo's exposition of the Jewish law, cataloguing the prizes God grants to the virtuous and the penalties he inflicts on the wicked. Philo moves from individual biblical figures (Enosh, Enoch, Noah, the patriarchs, Moses) to whole households and nations, then works through the covenant blessings and curses of Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.
Philo treats Cain, the first fratricide, as receiving a punishment worse than death: an unending 'process of dying' in which pleasure and desire are stripped from him while pain and fear remain, so that he perpetually 'groans and trembles' as Genesis describes, per the treatise's exegesis of Genesis 4:12,15.
Philo says Moses earned kingship, legislation, prophecy, and the high priesthood together, arguing each role requires the others: a king must command, a lawgiver needs prophetic insight to avoid error, and a prophet-priest intercedes for the people before God.
Yes. Philo envisions a future in which even predators — lions, leopards, tigers, elephants, and venomous creatures — grow tame toward virtuous people, framing this as the resolution of an ancient 'war without truce' between man and beast, prior to human wars of greed likewise ending.
Philo says that if the wicked are punished for correction rather than destruction and repent with full sincerity, God will free them 'in a single day' even from the ends of the earth, gather them to one place, and restore their ruined cities and barren land through three intercessors: God's own mercy, the patriarchs' intercession, and the exiles' genuine improvement.
Both at once — that is Philo's method throughout. He narrates the blessings and curses as real national events (war, famine, plague, restored cities) while also reading them as figures for the soul's condition, e.g. a soul 'populous' with vices becoming a 'pure virgin' once purged and impregnated with virtues.
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 Husbandry · On Joseph · On Mating / Preliminary Studies