Allegorical Interpretation
Philo of Alexandria
Book 3 · Section 82
About this work
An allegorical reading of Genesis in which Adam, Eve, and the garden become figures for the mind, the senses, and moral life. Philo brings Jewish scriptural interpretation into conversation with Greek philosophy.
- Author
- Philo of Alexandria
- Date
- First century AD; dates vary by treatise
- Genre
- Theological Treatise
- Textual language
- Greek
- Translator
- C. D. Yonge
- Translation / Edition
- C. D. Yonge translation, first published 1854.
XXVI. (82) But Melchisedek shall bring forward wine instead of water, and shall give your souls to drink, and shall cheer them with unmixed wine, in order that they may be wholly occupied with a divine intoxication, more sober than sobriety itself. For reason is a priest, having, as its inheritance the true God, and entertaining lofty and sublime and magnificent ideas about him, "for he is the priest of the most high God." Not that there is any other God who is not the most high; for God being one, is in the heaven above, and in the earth beneath, and there is no other besides Him." But he sets in motion the notion of the Most High, from his conceiving of God not in a low and grovelling spirit, but in one of exceeding greatness, and exceeding sublimity, apart from any conceptions of matter.