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The works of Philo Judaeus, the contemporary of Josephus
The works of Philo Judaeus the contemporary of Josephus Author:Philo Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and destroy 'wickedness ; and confusion is a name most appropriate to wickedness, of which every foolish man is a risible proof, having all his words, and intent... more »ions, and actions, incapable of standing an examination and destitute of steadiness. A TREATISE on THE MIGRATION OF ABRAHAM. I. And the Lord said to Abraham, " Depart from thy land, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, to a land which I will show thee; and I will make thee into a great nation. And I will bless thee, and I will magnify thy name, and thou shalt be blessed. And I will bless them that bless thee, and I will curse them that curse thee; and in thy name shall all the nations of the earth be blessed." God, wishing to purify the soul of man, first of all gives it an impulse towards complete salvation, namely, a change of abode, so as to quit the three regions of the body, the outward sense and speech according to utterance ; for his country is the emblem of the body, and his kindred are the symbol of the outward sense, and his father's house of speech. Why so ? Because the body derives its composition from the earth, and is again dissolved into earth ; and Moses is a witness of this when he says, " Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."f For he says, that man was compounded by God fashioning a lump of clay into the form of a man ; and it follows of necessity that, a composite being, when dissolved, must be dissolved into its component parts. But the outward sense is nearly connected with and akin to the mind, the irrational part to the rational, since they are both parts of one soul: but speech is the abode of the father, because our father is the mind, which implants in each of its parts its own powers, and distributes its energies among them, undertaking the care and superinte...« less