Philo of Alexandria - Books and Journals

40 part two
notjustinthecontextoftheAlexandrianπλίτευμα, but as individual persons.
Parallel to this, it is impossible to maintain on this account that such Jews were
‘apostates’, since Philo himself was one of the people concerned. (JR)
9736. P.W.vanderHorst,Bronnenvoordestudievandewereld
van het vroege christendom: Joodse en pagane teksten uit de periode van
Alexander de Grote tot keizer Constantijn, Deel 1 Joodse bronnen; Deel 2
Pagane bronnen (Kampen 1997), esp. 1.91–102.
In this magnificent Dutch-language source-book for the period from Alexander
to Constantine, Part One, devoted to Jewish sources, contains a section on
‘Philosophy and exegesis’. Four documents are translated and briefly commented
on: Aristobulus fr. 2, Philo Opif. 99–100, Migr. 86–93, Contempl. 21–39. The
passage in Josephus in which Philo is mentioned, Ant. 18.257ff. is also included
(vol. 1, p. 145). (DTR)
9737. A. Kamesar, ‘The Literary Genres of the Pentateuch as seen
from the Greek Perspective: the Testimony of Philo of Alexandria,’ in
D. T. Runia and G. E. Sterling (edd.), Wisdom and Logos: Studies
in Jewish Thought in Honor of David Winston [= The Studia Philonica
Annual 9 (1997)], Brown Judaic Studies 312 (Atlanta 1997) 143–189.
In this lengthy and learned paper the author attempts to demonstrate that the
relationship between Judaeo-Hellenistic interpretation and the Peripatetic/Alexandrian
tradition may have been deeper than has been acknowledged. He aims
to reconstruct, primarily from the Philonic corpus, a theory about the genres of
the Pentateuch which may go back to a time when the Peripatetic/Alexandrian
tradition rather than the Stoic/Pergamene approach was dominant. The first
section of the paper, entitled ‘The genres of Philo and those of Peripatetic theory’,
argues that the cosmological, the historical/genealogical, and the legislative
genre as found by Philo in the Pentateuch (see Praem. 2ff.andMos. 2.45ff.)
correspond with three genres of poetry distinguished in the Tractatus Coislinianus
and Diomedes. Section II (‘The Pentateuch and poetry’) deals with the
theory that in ancient times written discourse was generally in poetic form,
whereas prose was a later development: Philo in Det. 125 refers to the Pentateuch
as ‘divine poetry’. The theory indicated here may have reached Philo via
Peripatetic sources. Section III is entitled ‘Non-mythical and non-mimetic literature’.
Philo’s statement, again in Det. 125, that the Pentateuch contains no
myth (the same in Josephus), seems to put it in the category of non-mythical
poetry as described, e.g., by Plutarch—‘myth’ is here an approximate equivalent
of the Aristotelian term ‘mimesis’. In Section IV (‘The three genres as seen
from the literalist perspective’) it is argued that the tripartite scheme of Pentateuchal
genres is essentially literalist, since it allows one to establish the primarily
didactic telos of the Pentateuch without an appeal to allegory. Philo in
Conf. 14ff. acknowledges the legitimacy of the ‘literalist’ approach, although his
own approach to the problems of the literal text is an allegorical one. The author