The Mosaic code in his exposition is commensurate with life in all its aspects.  It deals not only with the duties of the individual but also with the good government of the state.  The life of Joseph is made the text of a political treatise, and throughout the books “On the Specific Laws,” the socialism of the Bible is emphasized,[94] and held up as the ideal order of the future.  The Jewish State is enlarged in Philo’s vision from a national theocracy into a world-city inspired by the two ideas of love of God and love of humanity.  In this conception, no doubt, the influence of Greek philosophy is to be seen; the Jewish interpreter keeps before him the “Republic” of Plato, and the “Polity” of Aristotle.  With him, however, the ideal state is not a vision “laid up in heaven";[95] its foundation is already laid upon earth, its capital is Jerusalem, and it is the mission of his people to extend its borders till it embraces all nations[96]—­an idea which permeates the Jewish litany.

This commentary of the law is allegorical in the sense that beneath the particular law the interpreter constantly reveals a spiritual idea, but it is not allegorical in the sense that he makes an exchange of values.  He is not for the most part reading into the text conceptions which are not suggested by it, but really and truly expounding; and where he gives a philosophical piece of exegesis, as when he explains the visit of the three angels to Abraham as a theory of the human soul about God’s being,[97] he does so with diffidence or with reference to authorities that have founded a tradition.  It is quite otherwise with the last class of Philo’s work, the fruit of his maturest thought, with which it remains to deal.

Throughout the “Allegories of the Laws” he takes the verse of the Bible not so much as a text to be amplified and interpreted, but as a pretext for a philosophical disquisition.  The allegories indeed are only in form a commentary on the Bible; in one aspect they are a history of the human soul, which, if they had been completed, would have traced the upward progress from Adam to Moses.  It is not to be expected, however, that Philo should adhere closely to any plan in the allegories.  Theology, metaphysics, and ethics have as large a part in the medley of philosophical ideas as the story of the soul.  His Hebraic mind, even when fortified by the mastery of philosophy, was unable to present its ideas systematically; it passed from subject to subject, weaving the whole together only by the thread of a continuous commentary upon Genesis.  Parts of the work are missing, it is true, which adds to the seeming want of plan; and—­greatest loss of all—­the first part, which gave the philosophical account of the first chapter of Genesis, the first six days of creation, referred to as “The Hexameron” [Greek:  to Hexemeron], has disappeared.[98] Here must have been the general introduction to the allegories, wherein Philo declared his purpose and his method of exposition.  The