Philo and Arithmology

Philo's use and understanding of the role of numbers are one of the more strange features in Philo's works. It is especially evident in De Opificio that he was interested in the symbolic value and role of various numbers, not at least the number 7.

Robert Kraft, University of Pennsylvania, has most recently mad available a paper on Philo's Treatment of the Number Seven in On Creation, a paper originally delivered for the SBL Philo Group, November 1996 (New Orleans). Here he has a confession that many others may subscribe to: It is tempting to say that the author of On Creation was inebrieated with thoughts of numbers in various connections and relationships. Whether and to what extent he might have been unusual for his time and training is one aspect of the problem. That he is usually perceived as unusual in this regard from our modern perspectives is obvious in the literature. My own interest in these matters is closely related to the fact that when I was first learning about the ancient Pythagoreans and their interpretations of reality in terms of number, I never could force myself, in scholarly empathy, into their world. Plato was difficult enough in his otherness. Now that I have been studying these issues for several decades, I find myself still largely an outsider. And this is itself seductive Philo's use of arithmology is interesting also because he refers to an other work in which he porbably dealt more extencively with arithmology, but this is lost to us.

Kraft has also made available another work on Philo's arithmology, namely Horst Moehring, "Arithmology as an Exegetical Tool in the Writings of Philo of Alexandria," pp. 191-227 in SBL Seminar Papers 1978/1.
In Kraft's own article he discusses the article of Moehring and the older work of Karl Staehle, Die Zahlenmystik bei Philon von Alexandreia (a 1929 Tuebingen dissertation published by Teubner in 1931).

I will include both this work of Kraft and the article of Moehring in my next update of my Philonic Resource Pages. But just to wet your appetite a little more, I'll quote the following from Kraft's conclusion: If I am forced to draw some tentative conclusions from all this, my feeling is that Op is a product of confident informed and enthusiastic youth, from an author who has not yet felt the sting of criticisms from his associates and others from whom he expected support. His discourse on seven is a draft of what he also included in On Numbers around the same time, but never introduced in such a full sampling in subsequent writings. If LA is based directly on that material, it is a faint and extensively reworked echo. It is easier for me to believe that Op is an improved version of what appears in LA, or perhaps simply an alternate version. I can also understand LA as a faint and toned down echo of the more inclusive and sophisticated tradition by an author who had lost or laid aside some of the boldness or brashness he once exhibited. Alternatively, but with less enthusiasm, I might resort to a theory of early and later editions of Op to explain how LA might reflect such a weak form of the "seven" tradition, being based on the early edition that was considerably strengthened later, after On Numbers had been completed. There are many paths; but they are all conjecture.