On the Creation of the World

Philo's treatise on the opening chapters of Genesis, written in Greek by a leading member of Alexandria's Jewish community. It reads the creation story with the help of Greek philosophy, especially Plato's Timaeus. Moses, Philo argues, begins his law with creation because the law of the Torah is in harmony with the law of nature. The six days are not periods of time but an expression of order, six being a perfect number. Before making the visible world God conceived an intelligible world, which exists in the divine Logos as the plan of a city exists in the mind of its architect. Philo distinguishes the human made 'in the image' in Genesis 1 from the moulded earthly human of Genesis 2, praises the number seven, and reads the Garden and the serpent as allegories of mind, sense and pleasure. He ends with five lessons, among them that God exists and is one and exercises providence.

It is the first sustained attempt to read scripture with philosophy, and its method was taken up far more by Christian interpreters than by later Jewish ones, a story worth knowing in itself.