Philo of Alexandria - Books and Journals

52 part two
9772. G. Sellin, ‘Die Allegorese und die Anfänge der Schriftauslegung,’
in H. Graf Reventlow (ed.), Theologische Probleme der Septuaginta
und der hellenistischen Hermeneutik, Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen
Gesellschaft für Theologie 2 (Gütersloh 1997) 91–132,
esp. 108–126.
After specifying the meaning and the function of the terms ‘metaphor’, ‘allegory’,
‘symbol’ the author sketches the history of allegorical interpretation, distinguishing
between a Stoic and a Platonic (‘diaeretic’) form whose first identifiable
representative is Philo. Since there is no allegoric exposition in early Rabbinic
writings, Philo’s method hardly can go back to the Palestinian haggadic
midrash, but has nearly exclusively Greek roots. The method of the Quaestiones
et solutiones grew out of Alexandrian philology of Homer and is exemplified on
p. 112f. The Allegorical commentary develops this method against a Platonic
background: the ideas or powers constitute the true signification of the words.
Thus beside the immediate predecessors, the Jewish allegorists from Alexandria,
the Philonic allegory has its precedents in the Platonic-Pythagorean tradition
which seems to be alluded to in Contempl. 29. For this, the Platonic use
of myths may have been exemplary. Philo’s occasional polemics against a Stoicphysical
explanation do not necessarily take aim at Jewish allegorists. But the
existence of etymological lists presupposes Jewish exegetes under Stoic influence.
(DZ)
9773.Y.Shavit,Athens in Jerusalem: Classical Antiquity and Hellenism
in the Making of the Modern Secular Jew (London 1997).
English translation by C. Naor and N. Warner of the Hebrew original first
published in Tel Aviv in 1992. It is remarkable how infrequently Philo is mentioned
in this wide-ranging study of how the views on the relation between
Judaism and Hellenism developed from antiquity to modernity, but he is occasionally
mentioned, e.g. on p. 68 (Moses learning from the Greeks), pp. 328–334
(later Jewish views on Alexandrian Judaism). (DTR)
9774. F. Siegert, ‘Die hellenistisch-jüdische Theologie als Forschungsaufgabe,’
in F. Siegert and J. U. Kalms (edd.), Internationales
Josephus-Kolloquium Münster 1997: Vorträge aus dem Institutum Judaicum
Delitzschianum, Münsteraner Judaistische Studien 2 (Münster 1997)
9–30.
In his inaugural lecture the author first lists the testimonies of Hellenistic
Judaism in the order of literary genres. Philo is characterized by the way he combines
divine transcendence, expressed in Platonic vocabulary, with immanence
described in Stoic terms. On p. 16 the author deplores the fact that scholars failed
to take sufficient notice of the pseudo-Philonic sermons he published in 1980
and 1992. After terminological questions about Hellenistic Judaism and the concept
of Christian ‘theology’ borrowed from (Jewish) Greek sources he gives three