Literatur des Zweiten Tempels zu Schemot 2:2

§ 106. It is impossible to reproduce in translation the thoughts which the ἀστεῖος of Ex. 2:2 suggests here to Philo. Struck, like the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews (11:23), with the word applied to the infant Moses in the sense of a fine child, on which he also comments in De Congressu 132, he naturally enough connects it with the Stoic use for “virtuous.” But he also remembers its connexion with ἄστυ, and this enables him to identify the ἀστεῖον παιδίον with another ideal of the Stoics, the “world-citizen”; see De Op. 3 and note. The same play on the double meaning of ἀστεῖος appears in § 109 ἀστεῖοι … πολιτεύματι.

[106] On the other hand the mind called Moses, that goodly plant, given the name of goodly at his very birth (Ex. 2:2), who in virtue of his larger citizenship took the world for his township and country, weeps bitterly (Ex. 2:6) in the days when he is imprisoned in the ark of the body bedaubed as with “asphalt-pitch” (Ex. 2:3), which thinks to receive and contain, as with cement, impressions of all that is presented through sense. He weeps for his captivity, pressed sore by his yearning for a nature that knows no body. He weeps also for the mind of the multitude, so erring, so vanity-ridden, so miserable—the mind which clings to false opinion and thinks that itself, or any created being at all, possesses aught that is firm, fast-cemented and immutably established, whereas all that is fixed and permanent in circumstances and condition is graven as on stone in the keeping of God alone.