Sastra Bait Kedua Keluaran 7:1: On the Birth, On the Change, Against Apion & That the Worse is wont to Attack the Better

[9] And even when He sent him as a loan to the earthly sphere and suffered him to dwell therein, He gifted him with no ordinary excellence, such as that which kings and rulers have, wherewith to hold sway and sovereignty over the passions of the soul, but He appointed him as god, placing all the bodily region and the mind which rules it in subjection and slavery to him. “I give thee,” He says, “as god to Pharaoh” (Exod. 7:1); but God is not susceptible of addition or diminution, being fully and unchangeably himself.

[19] His will is to be called the Lord and Master of the bad, the God of those who are on the way to betterment, but of the best and most perfect both at once God and Lord. For instance, when He has set Pharaoh before us as the crowning example of impiety He never calls Himself his God but gives that name to wise Moses, “Behold I give thee as god to Pharaoh” (Ex. 7:1). But He often names Himself as Lord in the oracles which He gives. We find such utterances as these,

§ 9. Ex. 7:1. Philo’s treatment of this text here is worth comparing with his other explanations. In Leg. All. i. 40 the mind is the god of the unreasoning element, cf. De Mut. Nom. 19. In De Migr. Abr. 84, the inspired mind is addressed as god, while in Quod Det. 161 the fact that the wise man is called the “god” of the fool is used as an illustration of the difference between reality and “opinion”; for even the wise man cannot be God in reality. To argue, therefore, as he does here, that an attribute which is inconsistent with God must also be inconsistent with Moses is to give the text a meaning which he shrinks from elsewhere.