Over and over again we find that he adopts some fancy of his ancestors and develops it rhetorically and philosophically in his commentary.  To give many examples or references to examples of this feature of Philo’s work is not within the scope of this book, but of his development of an old Palestinian tradition the following passage may serve as a typical instance: 

“There is an old story,” he writes, “composed by the sages and handed down by memory from age to age....  They say that, when God had finished the world, he asked one of the angels if aught were wanting on land or in sea, in air or in heaven.  The angel answered that all was perfect and complete.  One thing only he desired, speech, to praise God’s works, or to recount, rather than praise, the exceeding wonderfulness of all things made, even of the smallest and the least.  For the due recital of God’s works would be their most adequate praise, seeing that they needed no addition of ornament, but possessed in the sincerity of truth the most perfect eulogy.  And the Father approved the angel’s words, and afterwards appeared the race gifted with the muses and with song.  This is the ancient story; and in accord with it, I say that it is God’s peculiar work to do good, and the creature’s work to give Him thanks."[306]

Now this legend and moral appear in another form in the collection of Midrash, the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer, which apparently had ancient sources that have disappeared.  There it is told:  “When the Holy One, blessed be He, consulted the Torah as to the completeness of the work of creation, she answered him:  ’Master of the future world, if there be no host, over whom will the King reign, and if there be no creatures to praise him, where is the glory of the King?’ And the Lord of the world was pleased with her answer and forthwith He created man."[307]

The Haggadah is rich also in allegorical speculation, of which there are traces in the Biblical books themselves.  In the book of Micah, for example, we find that the patriarchs are taken as types of certain virtues, Abraham of Kindness, [Hebrew:  hsd], and Jacob of Truth, [Hebrew:  ’mt] (vii. 20).  And when the ideas of the people expanded philosophically in Palestine and in Alexandria, the profounder conceptions were attached to Scripture by the device of allegorical interpretation, and certain rabbis attributed a higher value to the inner than to the literal meaning.  Thus Akiba, who wrote an elaborate allegorical work upon the Song of Songs,[308] held that the book was the most profound in the Bible, and Rabbi Judah similarly regarded the book of Job.[309] The Palestinian allegorists took to themselves a wider field than the Alexandrian, and looked for the deeper meanings rather in the Wisdom Literature than in the Pentateuch, which was to them essentially the Book of the Law, and, therefore, not a fit subject for Mashal, i.e., inner meanings.[310] Hence, their allegorism was more natural, more real,