Philo's allegorical treatise defending the Tower of Babel story (Gen. 11) against pagan mockery by reading it as a moral parable about the soul's discordant vices.
On the Confusion of Tongues is one of Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentaries on Genesis, taking as its text the Babel narrative: "the whole earth was one lip and one voice for all" until God scattered the builders and confused their speech. Philo opens by confronting critics who mock the passage as mere myth, comparing it to the Greek story of the sons of Aloeus piling mountains to storm heaven, and he sets out to show that Moses' account, read properly, is not childish fable but philosophy in narrative form.
Philo's method is to treat the tower-builders, the plain of Shinar, the scattering, and the confusion of tongues as symbols for the inner life. The "one lip and one voice" of the wicked is not a literal ancient monolingualism but the terrible concord of vice, in which the many faculties of a corrupt soul act together in reckless unity, urged on by sense, passion, and false opinion. Against this he sets a different kind of unity: the harmonious agreement of virtues, and the "one race and one lip" that belongs to those who have fled toward God rather than banded together in wrongdoing. He works through supporting texts -- Jacob's sons calling themselves "sons of one man" and "peaceable," Jacob's lament over his sojourn in the body, the Egyptians fleeing "under the water" of the passions -- building a psychological anthropology in which the eyes, ears, and other senses are each made to function separately so that no single faculty can conspire with another toward evil.
The treatise culminates in a meditation on why the scattering itself is a mercy: God dissolves the massed ranks of vice and its false fellowship precisely so that the scattered can eventually be regathered by "a single proclamation" that God has himself written and confirmed. Along the way Philo touches on the Logos as the image of the unseeable God, the value of faith as the soul's most stable disposition, and the moral logic of law and punishment. The work matters both as a specimen of how a first-century Alexandrian Jew defended scripture against Greek ridicule using Greek philosophical tools, and as direct source material for later Christian allegorical exegesis of Genesis.
“What has been said on these matters will suffice. We must next examine, and not carelessly, what Moses philosophizes concerning the confusion of tongues.”
— On the Confusion of Tongues · read this chapter →
“Those who are displeased with our ancestral constitution, and who constantly practice fault-finding and accusation of its laws, seize upon this passage and others like it as stepping-stones”
— On the Confusion of Tongues · read this chapter →
“For it is fitting for those who have entered into fellowship with knowledge to long to see the Existing One; but if they cannot, then at least to see his image, the most sacred Logos”
— On the Confusion of Tongues · read this chapter →
“No, the aim is to dissolve the massed ranks of vice, to nullify its compacts, to abolish its fellowship, to destroy and annihilate its powers”
— On the Confusion of Tongues · read this chapter →
“The name most proper to vice is confusion, of which every fool”
— On the Confusion of Tongues · read this chapter →
It is Philo of Alexandria's allegorical treatment of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11, written to answer critics who dismissed the passage as mythical nonsense. Philo reads the tower-builders' shared 'one lip and one voice' as a symbol of the destructive unanimity of vice within a soul, and the scattering of the builders as God's way of breaking up that false fellowship.
He notes that critics of Judaism pointed to the Aloeus myth -- in which giants pile up mountains to storm heaven -- as proof that the Bible contains the same kind of childish legend. Philo uses the comparison as a foil, arguing Moses' account is philosophically serious where the Greek myth is merely fanciful.
Philo says that those who cannot directly see 'the Existing One' (God) should at least long to see 'his image, the most sacred Logos,' and after that the most perfect of his perceptible works. This treats the Logos as an intermediary through which the divine becomes contemplatable.
He argues the Craftsman deliberately kept the soul's faculties unconfused -- eyes cannot hear, ears cannot see -- so that no single sense could conspire with another to serve wrongdoing, and each could exercise its proper power for the soul's benefit.
Both, but Philo emphasizes mercy: scattering dissolves the 'massed ranks of vice' and its compacts, and he holds that those scattered will eventually find their way home again through a single divine proclamation that God has written and confirmed.
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