Egypt on the Pentateuch's Map of Migration in the Writings of Philo of Alexandria

Abstract

For the first-century Jewish scholar, Philo of Alexandria, the journey narratives of the Pentateuch/Torah constitute a kind of map of spiritual migration, a chart of the journey towards God, under the direction of Moses. Indeed, it is this understanding of the centrality of the journey in Scripture that determines the fundamental place of migration in Philo's philosophical interpretation of Judaism. Through allegorical reading of the journeys of the ancestors, from Abraham to Moses, Philo points to the deeper meaning of these journeys, their starting points and destinations, and the waypoints in between. The land of Egypt is a central point of arrival and departure, culminating in the great Exodus under the leadership of Moses. This essay examines the particular significance of Egypt in Philo's reading of the Mosaic map of migration. What did Philo, an Egyptian Jew, make of the Pentateuch's ambivalent construction of Egypt as home or waypoint on the ancestors' travels? Why did he consistently read the Pentateuch's Egypt as the symbol, par excellence, of ‘the land of the body’? I will suggest that two traditions seem to have been fundamental in generating this interpretation: the geographical imagination of the Pentateuch; and the influence of Platonist exegesis of the world imagined by Homer.