It would be easy to interest you, perhaps even to amuse you, by quoting some of the strange meanings which Philo gives to the narratives of familiar incidents. But I deprecate the injustice which has sometimes been done to him by taking such meanings apart from the historical circumstances out of which allegorical interpretation grew, and the purpose which it was designed to serve. I will give only one passage, which I have chosen because it shows as well as any other the contemporary existence of both the methods of interpretation of which I have spoken—that of finding a moral in every narrative, and that of interpreting the narrative symbolically: the former of these Philo calls the literal, the latter the deeper meaning. The text is Gen. xxviii. 11, “He took the stones of that place and put them beneath his head;” the commentary is:[104] “The words are wonderful, not only because of their allegorical and physical meaning, but also because of their literal teaching of trouble and endurance. The writer does not think that a student of virtue should have a delicate and luxurious life, imitating those who are called fortunate, but who are in reality full of misfortunes, eager anxieties and rivalries, whose whole life the Divine Lawgiver describes as a sleep and a dream. These are men who, after spending their days in doing injuries to others, return to their homes and upset them—I mean, not the houses they live in, but the body which is the home of the soul—by immoderate eating and drinking, and at night lie down in soft and costly beds. Such men are not the disciples of the sacred word. Its disciples are real men, lovers of temperance and sobriety and modesty, who make self-restraint and contentment and endurance the corner-stones, as it were, of their lives: who rise superior to money and pleasure and fame: who are ready, for the sake of acquiring virtue, to endure hunger and thirst, heat and cold: whose costly couch is a soft turf, whose bedding is grass and leaves, whose pillow is a heap of stones or a hillock rising a little above the ground. Of such men, Jacob is an example: he put a stone for his pillow: a little while afterwards (v. 20), we find him asking only for nature’s wealth of food and raiment: he is the archetype of a soul that disciplines itself, one who is at war with every kind of effeminacy. “But the passage has a further meaning, which is conveyed in symbol. You must know that the divine place and the holy ground is full of incorporeal Intelligences, who are immortal souls. It is one of these that Jacob takes and puts close to his mind, which is, as it were, the head of the combined person, body and soul. He does so under the pretext of going to sleep, but in reality to find repose in the Intelligence which he has chosen, and to place all the burden of his life upon it.”