Literatura ng Ikalawang Templo sa Genesis 31:54: On Drunkenness

I. First, “folly” or “foolish talking.” This with its digressions occupies from § 11 to § 153. Its chief cause is ἀπαιδευσία, that is defiance of or unsusceptibility to all educating influences (11–12). How abhorrent this is to Moses is shewn by the law in Deut. 21 that the parents of a rebellious and profligate son must bring him for judgement before the elders. The development of this illustration occupies sections 13–98. This rebellious son, the type of the ἀπαίδευτος, has four charges brought against him by his parents, disobedience, contentiousness, “riotous feasting” and wine-bibbing (13–14). The two first are distinguished as being the one passive, the other active (15–19). In dealing with the third Philo ignores the derived meaning—riotous feasting—of the obscure word συμβολοκοπεῖν and confines himself to what he supposes to be the original meaning. Of the two elements of which it is compounded he takes the first συμβολαί to represent “contributions” or “combinations” for evil, while the other (κόπτειν) shews the “cutting” or destructive force of these contributions (20–24), against which we are warned in the words, “Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil” (25). The fourth charge that he is “fired with wine” (οἰνοφλυγεῖ) represents a state in which the ἀπαιδευσία is inflaming the man’s whole nature (27). That his natural protectors, his parents, should be his accusers is the just punishment of such a one (28–29). But “parents” means more than the literal father and mother. In one sense our father is God and our mother God’s Wisdom, parents whose mercies and judgements alike are greater than we can receive (30–32). In another sense the father is “right reason” or philosophy, while the mother is custom, convention and secular education (33–34). This idea Philo proceeds to develop (33–92) in what is, in spite of minor extravagances, a really fine allegory and does much to redeem the general inferiority of this treatise. These parents have four kinds of children, (1) and (2) those who obey one parent but not the other, (3) those who obey both, (4) those who obey neither (35). We first deal with those who disregard the father and love the mother, i.e. the votaries of convention. They are typified, first by Jethro here, as always in Philo, “the man of superfluity” or “unevenness” (36). The special sayings of his selected here are his advice to Moses on the conduct of his business in Exod. 18 and his refusal to follow Israel in Num. 10, and even his saying, “Now I know that the Lord is great above all gods” is turned to his discredit on the grounds that “now” should be “always” and that he still ascribes reality to non-existent gods (37–45). The second example of this class is Laban, the admirer, as always, of the material and external, but his special error is his saying “it is not our custom to give the younger (Rachel) before the elder (Leah),” for the younger daughter, the learning of the schools, should precede in time the elder, philosophy—and Jacob’s reply to Laban is perversely construed to mean that he will never leave Leah (46–53). Some other texts are enlisted to shew the inferiority of the feminine element in mankind, as exemplified in Rachel, and her words about the “manner of women” in Gen. 31 (54–64), and we pass on to the next class, the father-lovers, the despisers of convention and followers of right reason only. These are especially represented by the Levites, who ignore and even as in Exod. 32 slay their kinsfolk and thus are murderers in the eyes of the conventional world, though not in the eyes of divine reason (65–67). The kinsfolk, etc., are interpreted to mean the body, the senses and rhetorical eloquence, all of which are sacrificed by the father-lover, and the final example of this class is Phinehas who slew the Midianitish woman (Num. 25) and whose story is interpreted in the same allegorical way with a short meditation on the rewards he received of “peace and priesthood” (73–76).