Philo allegorizes God's command that Abraham leave his land, kindred, and father's house as the soul's migration away from body, sense-perception, and spoken reason toward God.
On the Migration of Abraham is one of Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentaries on the Pentateuch, built around Genesis 12:1 -- God's command to Abraham to leave his land, his kindred, and his father's house for a land God will show him. Philo reads each element of the command as a symbol: the land is the body, kindred is sense-perception, and the father's house is spoken reason (logos). The 'migration' is therefore not a literal journey but the soul's progressive detachment from bodily and sensory life on its way toward contemplation of God.
Philo works through the biblical narrative episode by episode, extracting a moral-psychological lesson from each: the bones of Joseph preserved after death symbolize the soul's incorruptible virtues; Aaron sent to meet Moses represents spoken reason (the interpreter) paired with the mind; the five gifts God promises Abraham (a great nation, blessing, a great name, and so on) are stages of the philosophical life; Abraham's age of seventy-five when he leaves Haran is parsed numerologically as a boundary between the intelligible (seventy) and the perceptible (five, the senses). Philo also famously interrupts the argument to describe his own experience of philosophical composition -- sometimes finding himself barren and unable to write, other times suddenly filled and 'seized with a kind of frenzy' by thoughts poured in from above, an early and vivid first-person account of what he takes to be divine inspiration.
The treatise matters both as a case study in the allegorical method that shaped later Jewish and Christian exegesis (notably influencing Origen and the Alexandrian school), and as a philosophical text in its own right, fusing Platonic psychology (the tripartite division of soul, body, and senses) and Stoic ideas about following nature and God with close, word-by-word reading of the Hebrew Bible in Greek. It shows a Hellenized Jewish thinker treating scripture as simultaneously literal law and a map of the soul's ascent.
“Wishing to purify the human soul, God first gives it, as a starting point toward complete salvation, migration from three places: the body, sense-perception, and spoken reason.”
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“I am not ashamed to relate my own experience, which I have known times without number.”
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“The fifth gift, then, is the one that consists simply in existing itself; it is placed after the earlier ones not because it is inferior to them, but because it rises above and surpasses them all.”
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“For it is not because the seventh day is a teaching about the power that concerns the unbegotten, and the rest that concerns the begotten, that we should therefore dissolve the laws legislated for it”
— On the Migration of Abraham · read this chapter →
It is Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentary on Genesis 12:1, God's command that Abraham leave his land, kindred, and father's house. Philo reads this as the soul's migration away from the body, sense-perception, and spoken reason toward contemplation of God, tracing the stages of that ascent through later episodes in Abraham's and Joseph's stories.
Philo states directly: land symbolizes the body, kindred symbolizes sense-perception, and father's house symbolizes reason or speech. Leaving each of these behind marks a stage in the soul's purification.
Yes. In a well-known personal digression, Philo says there were times he intended to write on philosophical topics but found his mind 'barren and sterile,' and other times he came 'empty and suddenly became full,' with thoughts showered upon him from above under what he calls a kind of divine possession.
Philo treats the number allegorically: seventy stands for the intelligible, older nature, and five for the perceptible, younger nature tied to the five senses, so Abraham's age at his departure from Haran marks him as poised at the boundary between sense-bound and intelligible life.
No -- he explicitly criticizes people who treat practices like the Sabbath, festivals, and circumcision as 'mere symbols' and therefore neglect the literal observance; he insists both the letter and the allegorical meaning must be honored together.
Aaron represents spoken reason (logos), the faculty that interprets and gives voice to the mind's thoughts, sent to assist Moses (the mind) especially in confronting sophistic, deceptive argument.
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