" The dietary laws are at
once a symbol and a discipline of temperance and self-control. We know
that the Greeks, as soon as they had a superficial knowledge of Jewish
observance, jeered at the barbarous and stupid superstition of
refusing to eat pork. Again we are told in the letter of the false
Aristeas that when Ptolemy's ambassadors went to Jerusalem, to summon
learned men to translate the Torah into Greek, Eleazar, the high
priest, instructed them in the deeper moral meaning of the dietary
laws. Further, in the fourth book of the Maccabees--an Alexandrian
sermon upon the Empire of Right Reason--we find an eloquent defence of
these same laws as the precepts of reason which fortify our minds.
Philo, then, is following a tradition, but he improves upon it.
Accepting the Platonic psychology, which divided the soul into reason,
temper (_i.e._, will), and desire, he shows how the aim of the Mosaic
law about food is to control desire and will, so as to make them
subservient to reason. By practicing self-restraint in the two
commonest actions of life--eating and drinking--the Israelite acquires
it in all things. The hard ascetic who would root out bodily desires
errs against human nature, but the wise legislator controls them and
curbs them by precepts, so that they are bent to the higher reason.
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