Literatura ng Ikalawang Templo sa Genesis 30:1: Allegorical Interpretation

[46] But he is a shallow thinker who supposes that in strict truth anything whatever derives its birth from the mind or from himself. Do you not see that perception in the person of Rachel who sits upon the teraphim, is rebuked by “the seeing one,” when she imagines that movements have their source in mind? For she says, “Give me children; if you do not, I shall die” (Gen. 30:1); but he answers, “O woman, full of false fancies, the mind is the origin of nothing, but God who is antecedent to the mind is the only cause”; and so he adds, “Am I in the place of God who deprived thee of the fruit of the womb?” (ibid. 2).

In 46 f. Philo maintains that, though active Sense-perception, being an extension of the potential Sense-perception inherent in Mind, may be said to come from Mind, yet to suppose that anything whatever is, in the strict sense of the word, derived from Mind is to be guilty of shallow thinking, and illustrates the truth of what he says by the contrast between Rachel addressing to Jacob the appeal “Give me children,” and “the Lord opening Leah’s womb” (Gen. 29:31 and 30:1 f.).

[180] Joseph therefore went through the same experience as his mother Rachel. She too imagined that a created being has some power, for she says “Give me children” (Gen. 30:1). But the Supplanter will find fault with her and say, ‘Thou hast greatly erred, for I am not in the place of God, who alone hath power to open the wombs of souls, and to sow virtues in them, and to make them pregnant with noble things, and to give birth to them. Take note of Leah thy sister, and thou wilt find her receiving seed and offspring out of no created being but by God’s own gift’; “for the Lord, when he saw that Leah was hated, opened her womb, but Rachel was barren” (Gen. 29:31).