Littérature du Second Temple sur La Genèse 39:1

[111] But there is a different mind which loves the body and the passions and has been sold in slavery to that chief cateress (Gen. 39:1) of our compound nature, Pleasure. Eunuch-like it has been deprived of all the male and productive organs of the soul, and lives in indigence of noble practices, unable to receive the divine message, debarred from the holy congregation (Deut. 23:1) in which the talk and study is always of virtue. When this mind is cast into the prison of the passions, it finds in the eyes of the chief jailer a favour and grace, which is more inglorious than dishonour.

[173] He makes other offers, offers which mean loss though he speaks of them as profit. “Take your father and your wealth,” he says, “and come to me” (ibid. 18) into Egypt, come, that is, to this King of terror, who when our paternal and our truly real wealth had in virtue of its natural liberty left the body behind in its advance, draws it back and throws it with violence into a prison of exceeding bitterness; and over this prison he sets for keeper, as the oracular text tells us, Potiphar (Gen. 39:1) the eunuch and chief cook : eunuch, because he has scant store of excellence and has lost by mutilation the soul’s organs of generation, unable further to sow and beget anything that tends to discipline; cook, because in cook-like fashion he slaughters living beings, chops and divides them, piece by piece, limb by limb, and moves in a chaos of lifeless carcasses, immaterial rather than material;  and with his elaborately seasoned dishes arouses and excites the appetites of fruitless passions, appetites which should rather be tamed and calmed.

§§ 111–116. This allegory is evidently founded on Gen. 39, where in verse 1 of the LXX Potiphar is described as a chief cook and eunuch, while in verse 21 Joseph is said to find favour with the chief gaoler. Philo, of course, takes great liberties with the story, making Joseph an eunuch himself and ignoring the statement that it was the Lord who gave him this favour with the gaoler. Presumably he is so anxious to get an antithesis to Noah’s finding favour with God, that he seizes on these words in verse 21, couples them with the convenient parts of the story, viz. that the person who found favour with the gaoler was the slave of the eunuch and instrument of pleasure, and ignores all the rest. It may be said in excuse that by so ignoring them he manages to find a text for a very impressive sermon.