Stressing the importance of Alexandria as the centre of literal Homeric scholarship in the Hellenistic world, I have analysed for the first time Jewish exegetical works in light of the Alexandrian scholia to Homer. The scholia have never been translated from Greek into any other language and are available only in the form of running comments on the Homeric text, rather than in thematic arrangement, thus rendering access to them very difficult. Their relevance to Alexandrian Bible exegesis has thus far not been recognized.

My comparison of Homeric and Biblical hermeneutics has shown that Jewish intellectuals in Alexandria were acutely aware of the academic methods developed at the Museum. While there were lively controversies among Alexandrian Jews regarding the nature and legitimacy of Homeric scholarship, the overall picture is one of impressive creativity in dialogue with the surrounding culture. Jewish Bible scholars offered the first critical studies of the canonical text, thus anticipating modern research by more than two thousand years.

Each of this book's three parts has treated a separate category of Alexandrian Bible exegesis. The first has examined the early sources from the Ptolemaic period, throwing completely new light on each of them.The Letter of Aristeas is shown to be conservative, defending the biblical text against critical methods. The fragments from Demetrius have been read with special emphasis on his references to already existing questions and answers, which are used to reconstruct the history of this genre from Aristotle onwards.

The author of the Letter of Aristeas is known as a proud Alexandrian Jew, who was well integrated into the elitist culture of his surroundings. He wrote in elevated Greek style and was familiar with the Ptolemaic court as well as contemporary notions of a philosophical symposium. In this chapter I shall inquire whether Aristeas' general familiarity with Alexandrian culture also included Homeric scholarship. This question is of particular importance because of the relatively early date of the Letter. Accepting Peter Fraser's arguments for its composition during Philometor's rule, probably during its second half (164–145 bce), I shall argue that the Letter provides crucial insights into the state of biblical research during the peak of Homeric scholarship, when Aristarchus was chief librarian (c. 160–131 bce).

Pioneering work on the Letter of Aristeas was done by Günther Zuntz, who pointed to certain scholarly terms in the Letter which reflect the work of Alexandrian Homer scholars, without, however, being systematically applied. In his view, the author of the Letter suggests certain parallels between Alexandrian scholarship and the production of the Greek translation but on the whole lacks clarity and even a consistent message. Sylvie Honigman accepts Zuntz's basic observation but argues that the blurring of scholarly activity and the process of translation was deliberate. In her view, it testifies to the author's conviction that the LXX was sacred precisely because its production conformed to scholarly rules.

From the inception of modern research Jewish Bible exegesis in Alexandria has often been regarded as a marginal phenomenon or a puzzling hybrid. It tended to be studied either from the perspective of biblical interpretation in the Land of Israel or as a forerunner of Christian exegesis. Scholars familiar with the Jewish tradition usually focused on the emergence of rabbinic literature, which subsequently became normative. If Alexandrian exegesis was at all taken into account, it was characteristically either construed as a derivative phenomenon depending on its counterpart in Jerusalem or dismissed as an alien body of literature, which reflects Greek ideas and anticipates Christianity while failing to resonate in traditional Jewish circles. On the other hand, scholars familiar with the Christian tradition tended to approach Jewish Bible exegesis in Alexandria in the context of either the New Testament or patristic literature, giving special emphasis to allegory. In this scenario Philo figured rather prominently, often being praised as the representative of Hellenistic Judaism who prepared the way for Clement, Origen and others.

Luckily, a number of scholars have appreciated Alexandrian Judaism in its own right. During the transition period from the Enlightenment to Wissenschaft it was praised by Isaac Marcus Jost as a strikingly modern form of Judaism. He stressed that it was based on a division of state and church as well as on a cultural synthesis of Jewish and Greek traditions. Alexandrian Judaism emerged as an important paradigm for combining tradition with critical awareness.

In this section of the book we turn to the writings of Philo, not, however, for his own sake, but rather for the purpose of gleaning evidence about his colleagues and predecessors. We will thus be able to fill in a conspicuous gap in our picture of Alexandrian Judaism, which is created by the lack of independent exegetical sources between the mid second century bce and Philo. David Hay has already stressed that Philo did not write in an intellectual vacuum but conceived of ‘exegesis as a kind of dialogical enterprise that involves debate partners and opponents’, and we now face the challenge of reconstructing his intellectual environment.

Following the direction of Hay's own work, we shall focus on Philo's references to other interpreters. For the purposes of this book all of Philo's references have been carefully studied. The great variety of their style and content is so conspicuous that they must reflect different exegetical orientations of independent Jewish exegetes. They certainly cannot be reduced to rhetorical figures, which do not point to real people or discussions, as has sometimes been suggested. Philo's references thus provide an invaluable glimpse into the original variety of Alexandrian Judaism, which does not happen to have been fully preserved by the Church Fathers. The identity and precise historical circumstances of these exegetes can no longer be known, but Philo speaks of them as if they were contemporaries.

The last series of Philo' exegetical writings that we shall analyse in this book is the Exposition of the Law, which is generally recognized as belonging to a different genre from the Allegorical Commentary and the Q&A. Abraham Terian and David Runia rightly stressed this difference, insisting that Philo's treatise On the Creation belongs together with the Lives of the Patriarchs and should not have appeared in the English translation of his works before the three books of Allegorical Commentary on the creation. The structure of the Exposition was appreciated by the modern Hebrew translators of Philo's works, who published its different treatises in their proper order. The Hebrew reader of Philo thus moves from the Creation directly to the Lives of the Patriarchs and from there to the Decalogue and On the Special Laws. In this way Philo's argument about the law of Nature, which unfolds in these different aspects of the Jewish religion, is easily recognized as a prominent theme of the series.

The Exposition no longer follows the conventions of a running commentary, offering instead a broad paraphrase or summary of the biblical material. Leopold Cohn and Louis Massebieau have explained this feature by reference to the particular audience of this series. In their view, Philo addressed a wider Jewish audience in Alexandria than he had previously envisioned in the Allegorical Commentary and the Q&A, while not yet reaching out to an even broader non-Jewish audience, as he subsequently did in his apologetic and historical works.

In this chapter we continue to investigate traces of Philo's colleagues and predecessors, whose work is reflected in his reactions to them. A fragment of considerable size is preserved in Philo's biography of Abraham. Philo seems to quote here from a written source, reporting at length what ‘they say’ (ϕασί). This fragment from a lost work of Philo's colleagues throws further light on the diversity of Alexandrian Judaism and enables us to reconstruct one additional aspect of the general picture. While the exegetes quoted in De Abrahamo will be shown to belong to an Aristotelian milieu, they must not on this account be identified with the interpreters of the story of the Tower of Babel whom we have encountered in the previous chapter. The fragment discussed in this chapter will rather illuminate the rich diversity of the Aristotelian scholarly tradition among Jewish Bible exegetes in Alexandria.

The fragment in De Abrahamo points to a lively discussion among Alexandrian Jews concerning the legitimacy of historical approaches to Scripture. The question arises whether Scripture evolved over time and implies a development of the religion or instead reflects an eternal, unchanging truth. I shall argue that the above mentioned fragment is of the utmost significance in this context. When analysed with a view to contemporary Alexandrian scholarship, it emerges as a highly academic interpretation of the Binding of Isaac in the context of ancient practices of child sacrifice.

In contrast to the Letter of Aristeas, which opposes, as we saw, the application of rigorous academic methods to the Bible, Demetrius' fragments provide early evidence of positive connections between biblical and Homeric scholarship. Some Alexandrian Jews read their Scripture as a piece of literature and applied literary techniques to its interpretation. Following Jacob Freudenthal's seminal work, scholars have generally recognized the importance of Demetrius in this context. While Freudenthal's dating of Demetrius to the third century bce can no longer be maintained, his overall interpretation of Demetrius in light of zetetic literature is certainly valid and deserves further study.

Thus far, the argument has remained surprisingly general, relying for the Homeric evidence on Alfred Gudemann's famous dictionary article. A comprehensive study of Demetrius' fragments in view of their immediate Alexandrian environment is still warranted. The first step in this direction must be a clear distinction between Demetrius himself and the already existing questions and answers mentioned by him. In this chapter I shall focus on Demetrius' references to the latter, using them as a basis for reconstructing the views of other, anonymous exegetes in Alexandria.

If these snippets of information are analysed in light of their cultural environment, it emerges that Demetrius' colleagues were firmly committed to the Aristotelian style of question and answer. Moreover, these fragments throw new light on the development of the genre in Alexandria, where Aristarchus was sensitive to the same kinds of question, providing strikingly similar answers.

In this last chapter on Philo's anonymous colleagues we shall focus on diverse snippets of evidence rather than on one extended fragment. Throughout his different writings Philo refers to interpretations of Scripture which touch upon issues of text-critical work. The question thus arises whether some of the Alexandrian Bible exegetes not only were familiar with text-critical methods of Homeric scholarship but also applied them to the Jewish Scriptures. If this is indeed the case, as I shall argue, some Alexandrian Jews took the last step of integrating their foundational text into the contemporary, scholarly discourse on foundational literature.

There can be no doubt about the actual familiarity of some Alexandrian Jews with text-critical methods. Aristobulus in the second century bce had already employed them with regard to a pagan text. Quoting a passage from Aratos, he said ‘we have marked [this], removing the divine names Δίς and Ζεύς throughout the verses’. Aristobulus has thus identified an interpolation in a pagan text, which, he was convinced, originally referred to the God of the Jews. He marked the problematic words (σεσημάγκαμεν) and removed (περιαιροῦντες) the names of the pagan deities, writing theos in their place.

Both the method of text emendation and the specific Greek terms employed by Aristobulus belong to the world of Homeric scholarship in Alexandria. Beginning with Zenodotus, the first librarian, and reaching a climax with Aristarchus in the mid second century bce, Alexandrian scholars regularly identified corruptions in the epic text and marked them in the margins of their manuscript.

In this section of the book Philo's own work will be investigated in light of Homeric scholarship. Thus far, it has become clear that he was very critical of colleagues who adopted rigorous scholarly methods, either reading Scripture as literature in a general Aristotelian sense or engaging in text-critical studies in the style of Aristarchus. It now remains to be seen whether Philo's intimate familiarity with such scholarly methods is echoed in his own Bible exegesis. I shall argue that he did not ignore them, as may be expected, but rather used them in a sophisticated and highly innovative fashion to construct a separate discourse of Jewish hermeneutics. This is especially the case in his Allegorical Commentary, which will be the focus of the present chapter. Addressing an audience used to critical scholarship on the literal level, Philo seriously studied textual problems in this series of commentaries in order to justify his own allegorical interpretations. He thus created a new synthesis of approaches and conveyed a hitherto overlooked theory of allegory.

Although little attention has thus far been paid to the dimension of literal scholarship in Philo's Allegorical Commentary, Yehoshua Amir and Adam Kamesar have made significant progress on the question whether Philo regarded Scripture as a piece of literature. Amir has stressed the ambiguity of Philo, who sometimes speaks of Scripture as a divinely inspired text, while on other occasions addressing Moses as the author of a literary work.

Aristobulus is known as the first Jewish author who clearly defined himself as a philosopher. Writing in Alexandria between 155 and 145 bce, he must be interpreted in the context of the Letter of Aristeas and Demetrius. In comparison with these two, it is conspicuous that Aristobulus produced a unique, yet distinctly Alexandrian blend of critical scholarship and philosophy. While his Bible exegesis has been prematurely identified as a Stoic type of allegory, a systematic study of his work in its original, cultural environment is still warranted. When Aristobulus is interpreted in the context of contemporary Alexandria, he emerges as an Aristotelian scholar, who offers metaphorical solutions to textual problems. In the field of hermeneutics he throws important new light on the development of the Aristotelian tradition in the city.

The interpretation of Aristobulus as a Stoic allegorist has already been challenged by Peter Fraser and Nicolaus Walter. The former questioned whether an Alexandrian writer is likely to have adopted the methods of the rivaling school of Pergamum, while the latter stressed that Aristobulus used neither the terminology nor the motifs of Stoic allegorists. Moreover, it is significant that Aristobulus mentions in the few extant fragments a number of philosophers, especially ‘the Peripatetic school’, but not even one Stoic thinker. To the early Christian transmitters of his work, however, it was self-evident that Aristobulus' non-literal readings are a form of (Stoic) allegory. Clement and Eusebius introduced the term ‘allegory’ into their own comments on the fragments.