his design of revealing in Judaism a religion of universal validity, Philo points out in all these festivals a double meaning.  On the one hand, they mark God’s providence to His chosen people, shown in some great event of their history—­this is the special meaning for the Israelite—­and, on the other, they indicate God’s goodness as revealed in the march of nature, and thus help to bind man to the universal process.  So Passover is the festival of the spring and a memorial of the creation ([Hebrew:  zbr lm’sha br’shit]) as well as the memorial of the great Exodus, and of our gratitude for the deliverance from the inhospitable land of Egypt.  And those who look for a deeper moral meaning may find in it a symbol of the passing over from the life of the senses to the life with God.  Similarly, Philo deals with the other festivals,[164] and in their particular ceremonies he finds symbols which stamp eternal lessons of history and of morality upon our hearts.  The unleavened bread is the mark of the simple life, the New Year Shofar of the Divine rule of peace, the Sukkot booth of the equality of all men, and, as he puts it elsewhere, of man’s duty in prosperity to remember the troubles of his past, so that he may worthily recognize God’s goodness.  Much of this may appear trite to us; and the association of the festivals with the seasons of nature may to some appear a false development of historical Judaism; nevertheless Philo’s treatment of this part of the Torah is notable.  It shows remarkable feeling for the ethical import of the law, and it establishes the harmony between the Greek and Hebrew conceptions of the Deity by combining the God of history with the God of nature in the same festival.  The ideas were not unknown to Palestinian rabbis; Philo, by giving them a Greek dress, opened them to the world.

Equally remarkable and equally suggestive is Philo’s treatment of the dietary laws.  We have seen that he placed them under the governing principle of the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covet,” or, more broadly, “Thou shalt not have base desires.”  The dietary laws are at once a symbol and a discipline of temperance and self-control.  We know that the Greeks, as soon as they had a superficial knowledge of Jewish observance, jeered at the barbarous and stupid superstition of refusing to eat pork.  Again we are told in the letter of the false Aristeas that when Ptolemy’s ambassadors went to Jerusalem, to summon learned men to translate the Torah into Greek, Eleazar, the high priest, instructed them in the deeper moral meaning of the dietary laws.  Further, in the fourth book of the Maccabees—­an Alexandrian sermon upon the Empire of Right Reason—­we find an eloquent defence of these same laws as the precepts of reason which fortify our minds.  Philo, then, is following a tradition, but he improves upon it.  Accepting the Platonic psychology, which divided the soul into reason, temper (i.e., will), and desire, he shows how the aim of the Mosaic law about food is to control desire and will, so as to make them subservient to reason.  By practicing self-restraint in the two commonest actions of life—­eating and drinking—­the Israelite acquires it in all things.  The hard ascetic who would root out bodily desires errs against human nature, but the wise legislator controls them and curbs them by precepts, so that they are bent to the higher reason.