Philo's allegorical commentary on Genesis 15, asking who truly inherits God's gifts and analyzing prophetic ecstasy, faith, and the soul's kinship with the divine.
Who is the Heir of Divine Things (Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit) is a running allegorical commentary by Philo of Alexandria on Genesis 15, the chapter in which God promises Abraham an heir and seals a covenant by having him divide sacrificial animals. Philo treats the narrative not as history to be paraphrased but as a coded description of the soul's progress toward God, reading each detail - Abraham's childlessness, the slave Eliezer, the divided heifer, goat, and ram, the undivided birds, Abraham's trance at sunset - as a symbol of a psychological or spiritual truth.
The treatise opens with Abraham's protest that he is 'departing childless' and his slave will be his heir, which Philo unpacks as a meditation on what it means to possess anything at all: sense-perception, reason, even virtue are lent by God, not owned outright, and the wise man's proper response is gratitude rather than self-congratulation. He praises Abraham's faith as the one thing credited to him as righteousness, distinguishes several kinds of freedom and slavery of the soul, and works through the etymology of names (Masek, Eliezer, Damascus) as clues to the allegory. The long central section on the divided and undivided sacrificial animals becomes an extended argument about division as a method of the universe: everything in nature is composed of pairs of opposites, and the philosopher's task is to 'cut' correctly, discerning equal and unequal parts the way a skilled divider does at sacrifice.
The treatise's most famous passage analyzes Abraham's trance (Gen. 15:12), which Philo uses to distinguish four kinds of ecstatic seizure - madness, extreme astonishment, passive sleep, and the fourth, superior kind: the mind's eviction by the arrival of the divine spirit, which is how he explains biblical prophecy. This account of prophetic possession, in which the human mind must vacate itself before God can occupy it, is one of Philo's most influential contributions to later mystical and philosophical writing about religious experience. The work matters both as a sustained specimen of Alexandrian Jewish allegorical exegesis and as an early theory of inspiration that later Christian and Neoplatonist writers drew on.
“Now our task is to inquire who the heir of divine things is.”
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“For excessive griefs silence the mouth, and so too do excessive joys.”
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“For the soul too is, as one of the ancients said, a waxen tablet”
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“But the birds he did not divide”
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“About the setting of the sun," he says, "a trance fell upon Abraham, and behold, a great, dark fear falls upon him”
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It is Philo of Alexandria's allegorical commentary on Genesis 15, where God promises Abraham an heir and makes a covenant by dividing sacrificial animals. Philo reads the story as a symbolic account of the soul's dependence on God, the meaning of true inheritance, and the nature of faith and prophecy.
Philo singles out Abraham's belief in God's promise, despite having no natural heir, as the one act credited to him as righteousness. He treats this faith as superior to all Abraham's other virtues, since it means trusting the only truly stable thing, God, rather than uncertain human possessions.
Analyzing Abraham's trance at sunset (Genesis 15:12), Philo distinguishes raving madness, extreme astonishment, deep passive sleep like Adam's, and a fourth kind: the mind being evicted by the arrival of the divine spirit. This fourth kind is his explanation for how biblical prophets like Abraham and Noah received divine inspiration.
Genesis 15:10 has Abraham divide a heifer, goat, and ram but leave the birds whole. Philo turns this into a broader theory that the physical universe is composed of pairs of opposites that must be divided equally, while reason (symbolized by the undivided birds) is a unity that cannot be split the same way.
Eliezer is Abraham's house-born slave, whom Abraham initially expects to be his heir before God promises him a natural son. Philo reads Eliezer and his mother Masek allegorically, using etymology to connect them to ideas about servitude, favor, and what it means to seek help from God alone.
Philo's account of the prophetic mind being vacated so the divine spirit can occupy it is one of the earliest developed theories of religious ecstasy in the Jewish and Greco-Roman world, and it influenced later Christian and Neoplatonist writing on inspiration and mystical experience.
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