Philo's treatise applying the Ten Commandments' second tablet (adultery, murder) to Jewish law, covering sex crimes, bestiality, infanticide, and homicide procedure.
The Special Laws III is the third book of Philo of Alexandria's systematic exposition of the Mosaic law, organized around the Ten Commandments. Having covered the first five commandments in earlier books, Philo here takes up the sixth and seventh (against adultery and murder) and traces out the particular statutes he sees as flowing from them. He opens unusually personally, lamenting how public duties (likely his political burdens in Alexandria) tore him from the philosophical leisure he once enjoyed, before returning to the exposition as a source of consolation.
The bulk of the treatise addresses sexual offenses in something like escalating severity: adultery, incest (with an extended attack on Persian mother-son marriage and the myth of Oedipus as comparative evidence of its social devastation), marital purity laws, unions with sterile or already-tested-barren women, pederasty and the 'man-woman who falsifies the coinage of nature,' the myth of Pasiphae and the bull as a warning against bestiality, and prostitution. Philo then walks through the biblical ordeal for a woman suspected of adultery (the bitter-water rite of Numbers 5) in detailed, symbol-laden commentary, and later turns to murder: the killing of an already-born human being versus miscarriage caused by a blow to a pregnant woman, infanticide and child exposure (which he treats as endemic among non-Jewish nations and forbidden under Jewish law), justifiable versus accidental homicide, and the cities of refuge for the unintentional killer, tied back to Moses' own flight after killing an Egyptian overseer.
The work matters as a case study in how a Hellenized Jewish philosopher defended and rationalized Mosaic law to a Greco-Roman audience: nearly every commandment is paired with a Greek mythological or ethnographic parallel (Oedipus, Pasiphae, Persian customs) that Philo uses both to shame Gentile practice and to argue Jewish law is more rigorous and more rational. It is also a primary source for how an educated first-century Jew read Exodus and Deuteronomy's penal statutes as expressions of a coherent natural-law ethics.
“There was a time once when, at leisure for philosophy and for the contemplation of the world and the things in it, I enjoyed a mind that was truly beautiful, deeply longed-for, and blessed”
— The Special Laws III · read this chapter →
“The first commandment on the second tablet is this: "You shall not commit adultery," because, I think, everywhere in the inhabited world pleasure blows mightily, and no part has escaped its dominion”
— The Special Laws III · read this chapter →
“the man-woman who falsifies the coinage of nature be put to death without atonement, not to be allowed to live a single day or even an hour, since he is a disgrace to himsel”
— The Special Laws III · read this chapter →
“So great, it seems, is the foresight shown in the sacred laws that, to prevent men from admitting any unlawful union, it is even ordained that no beast be allowed to be mounted by one of a different kind.”
— The Special Laws III · read this chapter →
“By this same command another, still greater thing is also forbidden: the exposure of infants, which among many of the other nations has become, through their natural inhumanity, a tame and habitual im”
— The Special Laws III · read this chapter →
It is the third book of Philo of Alexandria's exposition of Jewish law organized around the Ten Commandments, covering the prohibitions on adultery and murder. Philo works through sexual offenses (adultery, incest, pederasty, bestiality, prostitution) and then homicide law (infanticide, miscarriage, accidental versus deliberate killing, cities of refuge).
He uses Greek myths as evidence for his Jewish audience's Greco-Roman world: Oedipus's incestuous marriage to Jocasta illustrates the social catastrophe of mother-son unions (which he attributes to Persian custom), and Pasiphae's union with the bull illustrates the horror of bestiality, which Jewish law forbids on pain of death for both parties.
Philo treats infant exposure and infanticide as a widespread and inhuman custom among non-Jewish nations, which Jewish law forbids as murder. He distinguishes this sharply from causing a miscarriage in an unborn child, arguing a born infant is fully a human being 'lacking nothing of what completes human nature.'
It is his detailed commentary on the biblical ritual (based on Numbers 5) for a wife suspected of adultery: she comes before the priest with head uncovered, and water mixed with temple earth and barley meal is used as a symbolic test, which Philo interprets allegorically as a search for truth about purity versus impurity.
He distinguishes the man who kills unintentionally, for whom the law prescribes flight to one of six cities of refuge, from deliberate murderers. He even suggests God sometimes 'delivers' a victim into an unintentional killer's hands as instrument of punishment for the victim's own hidden crimes.
He describes once having leisure for philosophical contemplation before being dragged into the 'great sea of the cares of public life,' a likely reference to his political duties in Alexandria, and presents writing this exposition of the law as a source of relief and escape from those burdens.
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