“What is the meaning of the expression, ’And Noah opened the roof of the ark’? (Gen. viii. 13.)

“The text appears to need no interpretation; but in its symbolical meaning the ark is our body, and that which covers the body and for a long time preserves its strength is spoken of as its roof.  And this is appetite.  Hence when the mind is attracted by a desire for heavenly things, it springs upwards and makes away with all material desires.  It removes that which threw a shade over it so as to reach the eternal Ideas.”

The “Questions and Answers” are essentially Hebraic in form, designed for Jews who knew and studied their Bible; and we can feel in them the influences of a training in traditional Mishnah and Midrash; but Philo passed from them to a more artistic expression and a more thoroughly Hellenized presentation of the philosophy of the Bible.  This work is the largest extant expression of his thought and mission; it embraces the treatises which we know as “On the Creation of the World,” “The Lives of Abraham and Joseph,” “On the Decalogue,” and finally those “On the Specific Laws,” which are partly thus entitled and partly have separate ethical names, as “On Honoring Parents,” “On Rewards and Punishments,” “On Justice,” etc.  Large portions of it have disappeared, notably the “Lives of Isaac and Jacob”; and also the “Life of Moses,” which was introductory to his laws.  For the book which we have under that name does not belong to the series, but is separate.  The purpose of the work broadly is to deepen the value of the Bible for the Jews by revealing its constant spiritual message, and to assert its value for the whole of humanity by showing in it a philosophical conception of the universe and its creation, the most lofty ethical and moral types, the most admirable laws, and, above all, the purest ideas of God and His relation to man.  All that seems tribal and particularist is explained away, and the spiritual aspect of every chapter—­of every word almost—­of the Torah is emphasized.  Philo expounds the sacred book, not of one particular nation, but of mankind.  The Roman and Greek peoples were waiting for a religious message which should at once harmonize with rational ideas and satisfy their longing for God.  All the philosophical schools were converting the scientific systems of the classical age into [Greek:  Tropoi Biou], “plans of life,” and Philo challenges them all with a new faith which has as its basis a God who not only was the sole Creator and Ruler of the world, but who had revealed to man the way of happiness, and the good life, social as well as individual.  To-day, when the world about us has accepted—­or has professed to accept—­the ethical law of the Bible, we are apt to regard the essentials of Judaism as the belief in One God and the observance of ceremonies.  But to Philo Judaism was something more comprehensive.  It was the spiritual life, and the Mosaic law is the complete code of the Divine Republic, of which all are or can be citizens.  In the introduction to the “Life of Abraham,” Philo explains the scheme of his work:[91]