Leaving Home: Philo of Alexandria on the Exodus

For Jewish-Hellenistic authors writing in Egypt, the Exodus story posed unique challenges. After all, to them Egypt was, as Philo of Alexandria states, their fatherland. How do these authors come to terms with the biblical story of liberation from Egyptian slavery and the longing for the promised land? In this paper I am taking a close look at Philo’s detailed discussion of the Exodus and locate it within the larger context of Jewish-Hellenistic literature (Wisdom of Solomon, Ezekiel’s Exagoge). In Philo’s rewriting of the Exodus the destination of the journey is barely mentioned. Contrary to the biblical narrative, in the scene of the burning bush, as retold by Philo, God does not tell Moses where to go. Philo’s main concern is what happens in Egypt: both in biblical times and in his own days. The Exodus is nevertheless important to Philo: He reads the story allegorically as a journey from the land of the body to the realms of the mind. Such a symbolic reading permitted him to control the meaning of the Exodus and to stay, literally and figuratively, in Egypt. The myth of the Exodus as narrated in the Hebrew Bible is an unusually powerful story. But it did not end with the Bible. Jewish, pagan, Christian, and Muslim authors pondered the meaning of the Exodus, commented on it, or simply rewrote the story. This paper on the dilemma of Jewish-Hellenistic authors such as Philo of Alexandria, writing on the Exodus in Egypt, is part of a group of contributions in this volume which ask questions about the intentions of new versions and interpretations of the
Exodus from the Hellenistic period till Late Antiquity (see, e.g., the contributions by Caterina Moro on the Jewish-Hellenistic author Artapanus, not discussed in my paper, and by Pieter van der Horst onthe “dialogue” between pagan and Jewish authors on the Exodus). It is, however, important to keep in mind that already the original story as told in the Bible is very much a literary construct with its own agenda. This paper thus asks similar questions of the Exodus myth as some of the Biblical scholars do (see, e.g., the contribution by Ron Hendel).