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Everything in the Bible thereby acquires a profoundly symbolical meaning, of which Philo becomes the interpreter. He reads the Bible as a history of the soul. We may say that Philo's manner of reading the Bible corresponds to a feature of his age which originated in the wisdom of the Mysteries. He indeed relates that the Therapeutæ interpreted ancient writings in the same way.
That it must have been so will be seen at once when we think of the sources from which Philo's doctrine was derived. It included in itself the Platonic theory of Ideas, the diffused Logos or anima mundi of the Stoics, and the Oriental angelology or doctrine of intermediate beings between God and man.
Abraham is the eternal type of the seeker after God, and as he first consorted with the foreign woman Hagar and had offspring by her, and afterwards in his mature age had offspring by Sarah, so in Philo's interpretation the true philosopher must first apply himself to outside culture and enlarge his mind with that training; and when his ideas have thus expanded, he passes on to the more sublime philosophy of the Divine law, and his mind is fruitful in lofty thoughts.
The central thought of Philo's system is that God is immanent in all His work; but it would seem to him sacrilegious to apply to the Godhead itself this universal, unceasing activity, and so he develops the Logos as the most ideal attribute of the Deity, and the sum of all His immanence and effluence.
It is natural that the larger number of parallels between Philo and the rabbis is to be found in the Haggadic portions of Talmudic teaching, for the Haggadah represents the same spirit as underlies Philo's work, though in a more peculiarly Jewish form; it is an allegory, a play of fancy, a tale that points a moral, or illustrates a question.
Philo's writings are valuable as showing the steps by which the philosophy of Greece may be traced from the writings of Plato to those of Justin Martyr and Clemens Alexandrinus.
Their political privileges were reaffirmed by imperial decree, and Philo's brother Alexander, who had been imprisoned, was restored to honor. "It is fitting," ran the rescript of Claudius, "to permit the Jews everywhere under our sway to observe their ancient customs without hindrance.
The Jewish State is enlarged in Philo's vision from a national theocracy into a world-city inspired by the two ideas of love of God and love of humanity. In this conception, no doubt, the influence of Greek philosophy is to be seen; the Jewish interpreter keeps before him the "Republic" of Plato, and the "Polity" of Aristotle.
Again, "God is omnipotent; He could make all evil, but He wills only what is best." "All is due to God's grace, though nothing is worthy of it; but God looked to His own eternal goodness, and considered that to do good befitted His own blessed and happy nature." Philo's life-aim, as we have seen, was to see God in all things and all things in God.
Through the mass of apocalyptic literature that was poured forth in the first centuries of the common era, through the later books of the Apocrypha, through the Sefer Yezirah of the ninth and the Zohar of the thirteenth century, and through the vast literature inspired by these books, run the ideas that composed Philo's mystic theology.
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