of Palestine.  The general aim of Philo’s exegesis of the law was to show its broad principles of justice and humanity rather than to formulate its exact detail.  It is true, he makes it an offence[287]—­unknown to the rabbis—­for a Jew to be initiated into the Greek mysteries, but usually he is concerned to recommend the Halakah to the world rather than expand it for his own community.  This is shown in his treatment of the civil as much as the moral law.  The great system of jurisprudence in his day, with which every code claiming to have universal value had necessarily to challenge comparison, was Roman Law.  That part of it which was applied throughout the Empire, the jus gentium, was regarded as “written reason.”  It is probable that contact with Roman jurisprudence had affected the practical interpretations which the Alexandrian Sanhedrin put upon the Biblical legislation, and was the cause of some of their differences from the Palestinian Halakah.  In treating the ethical law, Philo’s object was to show its agreement with the loftiest conceptions of Greek philosophers, and, indeed, its profounder truth; in treating the civil law of the Bible, his object likewise was to show its agreement with the highest principles of jurisprudence and its superiority to pagan codes.  If at times he supports a greater severity than the Palestinian rabbis eventually allowed, that is where greater severity implies a closer relation to Roman Law.  Thus he has not the horror of capital punishment which the Jerusalem Sanhedrin exhibited; he would condemn to death the man who commits wilful homicide, whether by his own hand or by poison;[288] whereas the other Halakah allows it only in the former case.  He who commits perjury also is to suffer capital punishment.[289] He adds a law which finds no place in the Palestinian tradition, making the exposure of children a capital crime.[290] Again, following the text of the Biblical law literally (see Deut. xxi. 18), he gives power of life and death to parents over their rebellious children, whereas the Jewish law demands a trial before a court to make the death sentence legal.  He approves of the lex talionis, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” agreeing here, indeed, with the opinion of earlier rabbis like R. Eliezer (see Baba Kama 84, [Hebrew:  ’yn tht ’yn mmsh], “the law of eye for eye is to be taken literally"), and disagreeing with the later Halakic interpretation, which says that the law of Moses means the award of the value of an eye for an eye, etc.

This is one instance among many of Philo’s adoption of the older tradition, established probably under the Sadducaean predominance, which was modified in the rabbinical schools of the first and the second century.  Paradoxically, in his exposition of the law, Philo follows the letter more closely as the expression of justice, while the later rabbis often allegorize it in order to support their humaner interpretation.  Thus, commenting on the passage in Exodus xxii. 3