extend its borders till it embraces all nations[96]--an idea which
permeates the Jewish litany.

This commentary of the law is allegorical in the sense that beneath
the particular law the interpreter constantly reveals a spiritual
idea, but it is not allegorical in the sense that he makes an exchange
of values. He is not for the most part reading into the text
conceptions which are not suggested by it, but really and truly
expounding; and where he gives a philosophical piece of exegesis, as
when he explains the visit of the three angels to Abraham as a theory
of the human soul about God's being,[97] he does so with diffidence or
with reference to authorities that have founded a tradition. It is
quite otherwise with the last class of Philo's work, the fruit of his
maturest thought, with which it remains to deal.

Throughout the "Allegories of the Laws" he takes the verse of the
Bible not so much as a text to be amplified and interpreted, but as a
pretext for a philosophical disquisition. The allegories indeed are
only in form a commentary on the Bible; in one aspect they are a
history of the human soul, which, if they had been completed, would
have traced the upward progress from Adam to Moses. It is not to be
expected, however, that Philo should adhere closely to any plan in the
allegories. Theology, metaphysics, and ethics have as large a part in
the medley of philosophical ideas as the story of the soul. His
Hebraic mind, even when fortified by the mastery of philosophy, was
unable to present its ideas systematically; it passed from subject to
subject, weaving the whole together only by the thread of a continuous
commentary upon Genesis. Parts of the work are missing, it is true,
which adds to the seeming want of plan; and--greatest loss of all--the
first part, which gave the philosophical account of the first chapter
of Genesis, the first six days of creation, referred to as "The
Hexameron" [Greek: to Hexemeron], has disappeared.[98] Here must
have been the general introduction to the allegories, wherein Philo
declared his purpose and his method of exposition. The first treatise
that we possess starts abruptly with a comment on the first verse of
the second chapter, "'And the heaven and earth and all their world
were completed.' Moses has previously related the creation of the mind
and sense, and now he proceeds to describe their perfection. Their
perfection is not the individual mind or sense, but their archetypal