HPB, in the glossary of the Key, apparently consulting a bio on
Philo, considers his writings to be of a kabbalistic nature -
Philo-Judaeus. A Hellenized Jew of Alexandria, a famous
historian and philosopher of the first century, born about the
year 30 B. C., and died between the years 45 and 50 A. D.
Philo's symbolism of the Bible is very remarkable. The animals,
birds, reptiles, trees, and places mentioned in it are all, it
is said, "allegories of conditions of the soul, of faculties,
dispositions, or passions; the useful plants were allegories of
virtues, the noxious of the affections of the unwise and so on
through the mineral kingdom; through heaven, earth and stars;
through fountains and rivers, fields and dwellings; through
metals, substances, arms, clothes, ornaments, furniture, the
body and its parts, the sexes, and our outward condition."
(Dict. Christ. Biog.) All of which would strongly corroborate
the idea that Philo was acquainted with the ancient Kabbala.
Although the explanations given are brief and from indirect
sources, the difficult to prove theory that Philo was aware of
the Kabbalah, which not even many Kabbalists of her time would
support, actually is slowly gaining mainstream credibility:
Naomi G. Cohen, Philo’s Cher. 40–52, Zohar III 31a,
and BT Hag. 16a, Journal of jewish studies, vol. lvii, no. 2,
autumn 2006
It has been shown that Philo has culled this esoteric tradition
from a commentary
identified by him as ‘Jeremiah’, since as pointed out above,
while
Philo names Jeremiah in II Cher. §49, what he is obviously
quoting is an esoteric
commentary on the prophetic verse found in the Book of Jeremiah,
for
in the same section he also identifies the esoteric exegesis of
the Pentateuch as
belonging to Moses.
The passage from the Zohar contains similar ideas, projects
similar images,
and uses the same biblical text, in the form found in the
Septuagint and
in Philo, but not in the MT, and BT Hagiga 16a contains
desiccated ‘bare
bones’ of this construct, divested of any discernable
theosophical dimension.
Thus the very same midrashic building blocks which stem from the
Septuagint
reading of Jer. 3:4 appear in Philo and in the Zohar, and to
some extent
in BT Hagigah 16a as well. The completely different form that
the tradition
takes in these very different sources is apparently the result
of their having
been transplanted into very different cultural soils and
climates.
This supports the thesis that a pool of esoteric Midrash common
to the
Hebrew/Aramaic tradition and the Greco-Jewish ‘world’ existed in
the days of
the Second Temple—in the days of Philo who was more or less
contemporary
with Hillel and Shammai. Further, since as we have seen, this
specific tradition
must have originated in Hellenistic Jewish circles for whom
theHoly Scripture
was the Septuagint, it also shows that contributions to this
midrashic pool
came not only from sources that originated in the Hebrew/Aramaic
speaking
communities, but that this was at least sometimes a two way
street.59 And
finally, it also lends support for the hypothesis, which, after
a half-century
of almost total eclipse, in recent years is gaining a more and
more serious hearing in scholarly circles, that some very early
esoteric traditions are in fact
embedded in the Zohar.