Rediscovering Philo of Alexandria, A First Century Torah Commentator -- Volume IV: Numbers

Philo of Alexandria (20  BCE.--50 CE.) stood at the crossroads of ancient history. Philo was the first  pioneer to integrate Judaic thought with the Stoic, Platonic, and Pythagorean  philosophical traditions. This Alexandrian Jewish philosopher assembled the  very first philosophical, ethical, psychological, exegetical, and theological  commentary on the Torah. As his community’s most prestigious Jewish leader, he  defended Alexandrian Jews from the attacks of anti-Semites, and met with the  capricious Roman Emperor Caligula, calling upon him to respect the ethical  monotheistic beliefs of the Jewish people. As with Josephus, Philo bears  witness to the world’s first protomodern and intellectual Jewish community of  Alexandria, the cultural center of Late Antiquity. Reclaiming Philo as a Jewish  exegete puts him in company with other great luminaries of Jewish history.  Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel has meticulously culled from all of Philo’s exegetical  remarks, arranging them according to the biblical verses. He provides extensive  parallels from the corpus of rabbinical literature, Greek philosophy, and  Christian theology in presenting how Philo impacted the great minds of Late  Antiquity and beyond. Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel is the  son of a Holocaust survivor. He holds two rabbinic ordinations from the Tomchei  Temimim Lubavitch Yeshiva of 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn and holds a D. Min  degree from the San Francisco Theological Seminary. He is an avid student of  the Greek classics, Biblical and Talmudic scholarship, Jungian Psychology,  Western Medieval Theology, Modern Philosophy, and 20th century psychology. He  is the author of The Lord Is My Shepherd: The Theology of the Caring God  (1996), Birth and Rebirth Through Genesis (2010), A Shepherd’s Song: Psalm 23  and the Shepherd Metaphor In Jewish Thought (2014), and Torah from Alexandria:  Philo as a Biblical Commentator (Volumes, 1-3),(2014-2015) keywords: Torah Commentary, Jewish Philosophy, Ancient  Jewish Thought, 1st Century Judaism, Hellenism and Judaism, Alexandria, Philo  of Alexandria, Rabbi, Samuel