On Dreams

The De somniis and the Quaestiones et solutiones in Genesim et in Exodum are usually added to this series. The first of these treatises, now badly defective, is, judging by the first third of it, not the psychological analysis that its title suggests but yet another allegorical commentary on the dreams sent by God to Jacob, to Joseph, to the officials of the Pharaoh’s court and to the Pharaoh himself. We note that Joseph, who was presented to us in the In Flaccum as the model of a good ruler, appears here, in the pursuit of the good, as a rather lukewarm person compared with Jacob, the noble ascetic.

Claude Mondésert, “Philo of Alexandria,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 3, The Early Roman Period, ed. William Horbury, W. D. Davies, and John Sturdy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 889.