deduces all his teaching from the Bible, not because he holds that it was explicitly contained there, but because he desires to give to his philosophical notions Divine authority.  Like the rabbis, again, he suggests definite rules of interpretation which may always be applied [Greek:  kanones tes allegorias].[119] He declares that every name in the Torah has a deep symbolical meaning, and symbolizes some power.[120] Thus the names of the sons of Jacob typify each some moral quality, and these qualities together make the perfect man and the perfect nation.  Reuben is “the son of insight” [Hebrew:  ru’bn], Simeon is learning [Hebrew:  shm’-on], Judah [Hebrew:  yhuda] stands for the praise of God.[121] It may be noted, by the way, that all these values show traces of Hebrew etymology.  Again, the synonyms in the Bible are to be carefully studied, while even particles and parts of words have their special value and importance.  And the skilful exegete may for homiletical purposes make slight changes in a word, following the rabbinical rule,[122] “Read not so, but so.”  Thus he plays upon the name Esau, and takes the Hebrew word as though it were written, not [Hebrew:  ’eshaw] but [Hebrew:  ’ashav], a thing made.[123] Whence he shows that Esau represents the sham (made-up) greatness, which is boastful and insolent and shameless.  Philo is referring perhaps to Apion, the vainglorious anti-Semite, whom he often covertly attacks.  Again, whenever there is repetition in the text, a deeper meaning is portended.  Dealing with the verse, “Sarah the wife of Abraham took Hagar the Egyptian” (Gen. xvi. 3), Philo comments, that we already knew that Sarah was Abraham’s wife:  why, then, does the Bible mention it again?  And following certain values which he has made, he draws the lesson that the study of philosophy must always go together with the study of general culture.[124] These examples are not isolated; yet it is rather a barren science to search for the canons of Philo’s allegory, as Siegfried has done.

For his allegory is a very flexible instrument, which can be employed at pleasure to deduce anything from anything.  And Philo regards these “points of construction” as the excuse, not as the motive, of his ethical and philosophical teaching.  He does not depend on such devices, for he wanders into allegory more often than not without any pretext of the kind.

The modern reader may consider the allegorical method artificial and unconvincing, even if he does not go so far as Spinoza, and say that it is “useless, harmful, and absurd."[125] We prefer to-day to show the inner agreement of philosophical with Biblical teaching, rather than pretend that all philosophy is contained within the Bible; and we accept the Bible as it stands, as a book of supreme religious worth, without requiring more of it.  But that is mainly a difference of taste or of method, and in Philo’s day, and in fact down to the time of the sixteenth-century Renaissance, Jew and Gentile alike preferred the other