Letteratura del Secondo Tempio su Isaia 50:4

[25] Thou hast given me a tongue of instruction that I should know when I should speak (Isaiah 50:4), my mouth that was knitted up Thou hast unsewn, and when Thou hadst opened it, Thou didst strengthen its nerves for speech; Thou hast taught me to say what should be said, confirming the oracle ‘I will open thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt speak’ (Ex. 4:12).

§ 87. (Pacification of wild beasts.) Philo has no authority for this in the Pentateuch beyond Lev. 26:6 “I will destroy evil (or wicked) beasts out of your land.” It seems to me impossible to doubt that he is thinking of Isaiah 11:6–9 or perhaps rather that he reads the text in Leviticus in the light of Isaiah; that is a straining of which he is not incapable. I do not understand Heinemann’s remark (Bildung‚ p. 419), that “it is noteworthy that he does not appeal to Isaiah xi.” Apparently he thinks that Philo has no direct knowledge of that passage (“schwerlich hat er von dieser Stelle unmittelbare Kenntniss”). If this means that the absence of any direct statement that the thought comes from Isaiah shows ignorance of the passage, I entirely disagree. Philo never mentions Isaiah by name, but quotes from him four times as one of the prophets and once (Quis Rerum 25, Isaiah 50:4) without any indication that it is a quotation. Here he gives the substance of Isaiah’s description spiritualized by the thought that this can never come about till the “wild beasts within ourselves” are tamed, a thought which to his mind, in which the allegorical is always seen behind the literal, would be assisted by the epithet πονηρά = “wicked,” applied to the beasts in Leviticus.