Joan Taylor

Lecturer in New Testament 2009-2010, King's College London

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Spiritual Mothers: Philo on the Women Therapeutae

Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23 (2002), 37-63.

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[JSP 23 (2002) 37-63] ISSN 0951-8207

SPIRITUAL MOTHERS: PHILO ON THE WOMEN THERAPEUTAE Joan E. Taylor
14 Friars Close, Wivenhoe, Essex

ABSTRACT
Philo of Alexandria describes the Jewish men and women known as the ‘Therapeutae’ in his treatise De Vita Contemplativa (c. 41 CE) as people who are truly good. They live a virtuous existence, practicing an ascetic, contemplative life of philosophy. However, in antiquity women philosophers could be seen as unfeminine and dangerously sexual. Women Therapeutae were therefore a rhetorical problem for Philo, as it would have been difﬁcult for him to ensure that they were clearly seen as ‘good’. To solve the problem Philo insists on their virginity, while also characterizing them as maternal (thereby feminine). By considering Philo’s rhetoric here we not only better understand his concerns but also aspects of the historical Therapeutae that this rhetoric can both illuminate and obscure.

There have been a great many studies on the people Philo describes in his essay, De Vita Contemplativa. Usually referred to as the ‘Therapeutae’ (and identiﬁed just in this one text), they are frequently called as evidence in discussions of Jewish sects, especially the Essenes and those who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls, or early Christian ascetics.1 Interest in the
1. See, among many examples, M. Simon, Jewish Sects at the Time of Jesus (trans. J.H. Farley; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), pp. 120-30 (translation of French original Les sectes juives au temps de Jésus [Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1960]); G. Vermes and M. Goodman (eds.), The Essenes according to the Classical Sources (Shefﬁeld: Shefﬁeld Academic Press, 1989), p. 76; R. Bergmeier, Die Essener-Berichte des Flavius Josephus: Quellenstudien zu den Essenertexten im Werk des jüdischen Historiographen (Kampen: Kok, 1993), pp. 41-47. For a survey of those who link the Therapeutae with the Essenes, see J. Riaud, ‘Les Thérapeutes d’Alexandrie dans la Tradition et dans la recherche critique jusqu’aux découvertes de Qumran’,
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Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23 (2002)

women Therapeutae has been rather slight, but Ross Kraemer provided a very important assessment in an article published over a decade ago,2 and, more recently, Holger Szesnat has focused on issues of women, sexuality and gender.3 The present article is a preliminary exploration of certain topics that will be examined in greater detail in a forthcoming book.4 I take the opportunity here to discuss some of the more interesting issues of women and gender within Philo’s text, and consider also the historical situation of the Therapeutae. In undertaking this discussion, I am concerned to shed light on an aspect of Jewish women’s history in antiquity, but also I hope that this study will show how a speciﬁc analysis focused on women may in fact offer insights into the group as a whole, and also Alexandrian Judaism. Philo’s Conception of Women There are two main levels that need to be considered in this discussion: ﬁrst, Philo’s highly rhetorical text itself and, second, the historical reality to which Philo points. In regard to Philo’s text of De Vita Contemplativa, we must not assume that it is a repository of factual information, or that Philo is giving us a wholly accurate picture of the community he describes. What he does not say in regard to the community may be as important as what he does say.5 If we were to visit the community that Philo may have
in W. Haase and H. Temporini (eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt: Geschichte und Kultur Roms im Spiegel der neueren Forschung II.20.2 (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1987), pp. 1189-295 (1241-64). For a comparison between the ‘Therapeutae’ and early Christians see G.P. Richardson, ‘Philo and Eusebius on Monasteries and Monasticism: The Therapeutae and Kellia’, in B.H. McLean (ed.), Origins and Method— Towards and Understanding of Judaism and Christianity: Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd (JSNTSup, 86; Shefﬁeld: JSOT Press, 1993), pp. 334-59. Studies on De Vita Contemplativa are listed every year in the The Studia Philonica Annual bibliography. 2. Ross S. Kraemer, ‘Monastic Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Egypt: Philo Judaeus on the Therapeutrides’, Signs 14 (1989), pp. 342-70. 3. Holger Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins”: Philo and the Presence of the Therapeutrides at Lake Mareotis’, Neotestamentica 32 (1998), pp. 191-201; idem, ‘ “Pretty Boys” in Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa’, The Studia Philonica Annual 10 (1998), pp. 87-107; cf. also idem, ‘Philo and Female Homoeroticism: Philo’s Use of gu/nandroj and Recent Work on Tribades’, JSJ 30 (1999), pp. 140-47. 4. To be published by Clarendon Press (Oxford). 5. David Hay, ‘Things Philo Said and Did Not Say About the Therapeutae’, Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers (SBLSP, 31; Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1992), pp. 673-83, and see also Troels Engberg-Pedersen, ‘Philo’s De Vita Contempla© The Continuum Publishing Group Ltd 2002.

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visited, what might we see? Clearly, we would ask different questions to those Philo asked, and we would present what we saw differently, for different purposes. In order to ‘visit’ this group in terms of our historical imagination, we need to approach Philo’s text with extreme caution, and try to identify his rhetoric. While such an approach will not leave us with sure facts, it may at least open up dimensions of possible historical reality that have hitherto remained hidden. According to the ancient sub-heading to Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa, it forms the fourth part of a discussion of the virtues, a work probably titled peri\ a0retw~n, On Virtues. Eusebius mentions that the Legatio is the second part of this ﬁve part work (Hist. Eccles. 2.5.6; 2.6.3; 2.18.8).6 If these identiﬁcations are accurate, then the evidence would indicate that Philo began this project after the catastrophic events of 38 CE and deputation to Gaius Caligula (c. 39–40 CE), which he led (Josephus, Ant. 18.259). In On Virtues he appears to have used, as illustrations, examples from Jewish life: the persecuted Jews (no. 2); the Essenes (no. 3);7 the Therapeutae (no. 4). This work (written c. 40 CE) would then have had an immediate political relevance, in that Philo was seeking to prove the excellent virtue of the Jews, who were at that time in fear of their lives. One should not, after all, demand the deaths of those who are virtuous. De Vita Contemplativa is designed to show that the pinnacle of human existence—manifested in a truly philosophical, contemplative, good life— was experienced by a group of Jews living outside Alexandria. Therefore, everything about the group is good. What Philo or his audience perceive to be good may not be good by our deﬁnitions. Moreover, historians are concerned with what was real about the group, not what was good. We need to be very clear at the outset that our purposes are very different from Philo’s, and he is not writing at all
tiva as a Philosopher’s Dream’, JSJ 30 (1999), pp. 40-64 (48), who argues that the idealizing elements are so extensive that one could classify it as ‘ﬁction’. 6. For an introduction to Philo and his works, see Jenny Morris, ‘The Jewish Philosopher Philo’, in E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135) (rev. and ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar and M. Goodman; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), III.2, pp. 809-70, esp. p. 863 regarding Eusebius comments on Leg. Gai. For the edition of De Vita Contemplativa used here, see F.L. Colson, Philo (LCL; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941), IX, pp. 112-68; for the ancient title and also that of Legatio see p. 112 and the Appendix on p. 518. Eusebius does not speciﬁcally mention the subtitle when he discusses De Vita Contemplativa (Hist. Eccles. 2.17). 7. Cf. Vit. Cont. 1.
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for us. In recognizing Philo’s dominant concern and our own concerns, we can begin to be sensitive to the dissonance between them, and distance ourselves slightly from Philo’s rhetoric. The Therapeutae are not themselves active players in terms of the creation of their textual reality. They are reiﬁed as ‘that which is good’ by Philo. It is fundamental that we recognize the group’s passivity and the role they play rhetorically in Philo’s text before we can begin to assess their historical reality.8 We have no documents from the group, and there appears to be no other author from antiquity who describes them. Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa drives all historical assessments of what the group was like. In naming his subjects, Philo immediately identiﬁes them as exemplary; he deﬁnes them as qerapeutai/ (‘devotees’ or ‘servers’ [of God]), and once, in the title, by the similar term i9ke/toi (‘suppliants’ [of God]).9 According to Philo, they are in fact part of a very wide category of qerapeutai/, spanning many ethnic groups and countries (Vit. Cont. 12). These are people who live a virtuous, contemplative existence. In describing the women speciﬁcally in a particular group, Philo’s aim was to present them as ‘that which is good’, along with all other elements, so that they would be clearly seen as belonging to this category of humanity. He could rely on widely held notions of what it meant to be a good woman in Hellenistic society.10
8. See the hermeneutical theory developed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza in regard to early Christian texts: ‘Text as Reality—Reality as Text: The Problem of a Feminist Historical and Social Reconstruction Based on Texts’, ST 43 (1989), pp. 19-34; idem, ‘The Study of Women in Early Christianity: Some Methodological Considerations’, in T.J. Ryan (ed.), Critical History and Biblical Faith: New Testament Perspectives (Villanova, PA: College Theology Society, 1979), pp. 30-58; idem, ‘The Rhetoricity of Historical Knowledge: Pauline Discourse and its Contextualizations’, in Lukas Bornkamm, Kelly del Tredici and Angela Starthartinger (eds.), Religious Propaganda and Missionary Competition in the New Testament World: Essays Honoring Dieter Georgi (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), pp. 443-69; see also Bernadette Brooten, ‘Early Christian Women and their Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Construction’, in Adela Yarbro Collins (ed.), Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 69-91. 9. For the translation of qerapeutai/ as ‘devotees [of God]’, see J.E. Taylor and P.R. Davies, ‘The So-Called “Therapeutae” of De Vita Contemplativa: Identity and Character’, HTR 91.1 (1998), pp. 3-24 (4-10). 10. For a general discussion of women in Hellenistic society, see Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1975), pp. 120-48. I use the term ‘Hellenistic’ rather than ‘Roman’ here as the former applies better to the social world of ﬁrst-century Alexandria than the term ‘Roman’, which largely reﬂects the political, administrative situation. Others may prefer
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More speciﬁcally, however, Philo himself had constructed a theory of woman and the feminine that would dictate not only how he modelled his allegorical universe of interpretation, but how he saw real women. Perhaps Philo’s fundamental problem may be expressed as follows: how could the women Therapeutae, the female ‘devotees’ of God, be presented in a way that would conform to his own gender theory, and also be presented as good? This was possibly not so easy for Philo to resolve, for ‘woman’ as a category both actual and metaphorical tends to be conﬁgured somewhat negatively in his works. Philo’s construction of women has been explored in depth by both Dorothy Sly and Richard Baer11 and only the most salient issues will be discussed here. It should be noted that Philo deﬁnes ‘woman’ by focusing mainly on elite women. Women—inferentially, of the upper class—should remain modestly at home (Spec. Leg. 3.169-71; 4.225; Quaest. in Gen. 1.26). They should be seen only ﬂeetingly in public, always accompanied by escorts (Sacr. 26-27). Lower class women are described as being out in the market-place: immodest women who ﬁght and use bad language (Spec. Leg. 3.172-75). The ‘public’ woman is, for Philo, stereotypically, the whore (Spec. Leg. 3.51; Sacr. 21-24). Philo seems highly inﬂuenced by notions of Aristotle in regard to gender,12 for women are inferior to men by nature (Spec. Leg. 2.124; 4.223; Quaest. in Exod. 1.7), more prone to be deceived (Quaest. in Gen. 1.33) and to deceive (Hypoth. 11.14-17; cf. Op. Mund. 165). A male is more related to
‘Graeco-Roman’. I avoid it only because I would not wish to emphasize in any way Roman inﬂuence on culture and society at this early stage. 11. Dorothy Sly, Philo’s Perception of Women (BJS, 209; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990); Richard A. Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories Male and Female (ALGHJ, 3; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970). 12. See, for example, Aristotle, De Generatione Animalium 4.4, 775a. Discussions of Aristotle’s views on women may be found in S. Clark, ‘Aristotle’s Woman’, History of Political Thought 3 (1982), pp. 177-91; Giulia Sissa, ‘The Sexual Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle’, in Paula Schmitt Pantel (ed.), A History of Women in the West. I. From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992 ) (a translation by Arthur Goldhammer of Storia delle Donne in Occidente. I. L’Antichità [Roma-Bari: Gius. Laterza & Figli Spa, 1990], pp. 46-81); N. Smith, ‘Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (1983), pp. 467-78. For other Hellenistic inﬂuences on Philo’s construction of gender see Judith Romney Wegner, ‘Philo’s Portrayal of Women—Hebraic or Hellenic?’, in Amy-Jill Levine (ed.), ‘Women Like This’: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the GrecoRoman World (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), pp. 41-66.
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domination and the ‘efﬁcient cause’, while a female is imperfect, subject, the passive rather than active (Spec. Leg. 1.200), an image derived from Classical notions of sexual power relations,13 as well as common beliefs about the determinative active power or movement of the male seed to form a new human being in passive, formless female material within the womb.14 Given this ‘natural’ situation, husbands should be in control of their wives (Hypoth. 7.3). Much can be learned of Philo’s perception of gender relations by an exploration of his metaphorical/allegorical psychic universe. Philo writes that nou~j (‘mind’), corresponds to man and ai1sqhsij (‘sense-perception’) to woman (Op. Mund. 165; Leg. 2.38), for mind is active and sense-perception passive. In the same way that male is superior to female, mind is superior to sense-perception (Leg. 3.222).15 There seems no question that Philo considered maleness and men superior to femaleness and women in every way that he determined to be important. In Philo’s exegesis of the creation of humankind, a1nqrwpoj is created which is ‘neither male nor female’, that is, it is genderless. Despite this, for Philo, the supposedly genderless state is still somehow essentially masculine.16 This is quite different from later rabbinic exegesis which would have Adam as androgynous, or rather hermaphroditic, containing both male and female.17 This a1nqrwpoj is both nou~j and lo/goj (Det. Pot. Ins. 83-84): masculine entities in Philo’s symbolic schema. Only with the creation of woman does the feminine appear. Materiality, namely the human body (sw~ma), enters the pure, masculine and spiritual construction of ‘humanity’, bringing with it/her bodily pleasure which issues forth sin and violation of God’s law (Op. Mund. 152, 165-66), and ultimately death (Quaest. in Gen. 1.37, cf. 43, 45).18 The creation of woman, therefore, opens the pathways to sin and death (cf. Sir. 25.24).

13. See Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 1-2. 14. Op. Mund. 67, 132; Quaest. in Gen. 3.47. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.6.998a. 15. See Sharon Lea Mattila, ‘Wisdom, Sense Perception, Nature and Philo’s Gender Gradient’, HTR 89 (1996), pp. 103-29 (112-20). 16. The group a[nqrwpoi tends also to be masculine in Philo’s usage, see Sly, Perception, pp. 59-70. 17. Wegner, ‘Philo’s Portrayal of Women’, p. 47, citing b. Ket. 8a, b; b. Ber. 61a, b; b. ‘Erub. 18a. 18. Wegner, ‘Philo’s Portrayal of Women’, pp. 48-49.
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For Philo, the masculinity of the soul manifests itself as self-control, asceticism, reason and activity, and the femininity of the soul as passion, materiality, irrationality and passivity.19 Theoretically, perhaps, one need not connect these gendered characteristics of the soul with the physical body. However, indeed, the body’s sex does determine the innate sexual characteristics of the soul. Women naturally reﬂect the essential characteristics of the ﬁrst woman, in the same way that men naturally reﬂect those of the ﬁrst man. A man thinks in a more ‘masculine’ way, and a woman in a more ‘feminine’ way, because the sex of the body is duplicated in one’s essential nature (cf. Omn. Prob. Lib. 117). In general, it is natural and good that women should be women and men should be men, and therefore that the former should be in a subordinate position to the latter. Ordinarily, Philo does not think women should try to become like men, a view he shares with many of his contemporaries. For example, when Plutarch describes Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia, he stresses her masculine way of thinking and her neglect of usual female jobs, like spinning and housekeeping, in order to characterize her as a bad woman, who weakened Mark Antony’s (Roman) character and ultimately prepared him for his domination/seduction by Cleopatra (Plutarch, Ant. 10). Philo too can use the notion of masculinized women pejoratively when talking about women in the market taking on masculine actions or attending gymnastic contests (Spec. Leg. 3.172-77).20 What then should he do with the women Therapeutae, who, in living a spiritual and intellectual lifestyle (focusing on the nou~j) together with men in a small extra-domestic group, may have been construed as being rather ‘manly’? We may consider Philo’s description of Livia, wife of Augustus (Leg. Gai. 319-20), who adorned the Jerusalem Temple with libation bowls and golden vials. Philo comments:
The judgments of women are usually weaker [than those of men] and do not apprehend any mental conception apart from what their senses perceive. But she [Livia] excelled all her sex in this as in everything, for the purity of the

19. See Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories, pp. 38-44; Sly, Perception, pp. 96-97. For speciﬁc passages illustrating such a conceptualization, see Spec. Leg. 2.38, 49-50; 3.49-50, 222-24; Spec. Leg. 1.200; Op. Mund. 165-67; Quaest. in Gen. 1.43; 4.15-18; Fug. 51. 20. See also his negative use of the word guna/ndroj (Sacr. 100; Rer. Div. Her. 274; Virt. 21), noted by Szesnat, ‘Pretty Boys’, p. 98 n. 45, and idem, ‘Philo and Female Homoeroticism’.
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training she received21 supplemented [her female] nature and practice provided masculinity to her faculty of reason. (Leg. Gai. 319)22

As Philo understood it, Livia’s female nature would naturally have led her only to sense-perception, but through the intervention of her husband— deﬁned in this text as a virtuous philosopher (Leg. Gai. 143, 309, 318)— she is instructed in such a way as to develop a masculinity in her faculty of reason. In the same way, Philo accounts for the historical virtue of Sarah—as well as providing a rationale for his symbolism of the matriarch as virtue—by masculinizing her. Like the Greek goddess Artemis, she has left a women’s world and is motherless, having kinship only with her father’s side (Ebr. 59-61).23 Szesnat also points out Philo’s description of the Dardanian women who killed their children rather than having them brought up as slaves (Omn. Prob. Lib. 115) as another example of the heroic manly woman.24 Philo clearly had the option, then, in terms of describing his women Therapeutae as good, to argue that they were women with masculinized minds. It should be noted that the reverse can take place in the male mind: it can be feminized by sense-perception. This is considered damaging. A man, for example, ‘emasculates’ himself (that is, his soul) when exhibiting the desire that results in having sex with his wife (Cher. 40-41), for this involves a high degree of (feminine) sense-perception. Only by having sex purely for procreation (that is, by rational decision for a speciﬁc purpose) could men escape to some degree such emasculation (Spec. Leg. 3.32-4; Quaest. in Gen. 4.154).25 Szesnat has explored also how slave boys are described as having ‘female disease’ (Vit. Cont. 60) since the passive submission of these boys in sex changes their bodies and essential natures into a more feminine form (cf. Spec. Leg. 3.37).26 Such a boy becomes an a1ndro/gunoj, a ‘womanly’ man.
21. Her instructor in this training is understood to be Augustus. 22. See particularly Sly, Perception, pp. 179-209, and idem, Philo’s Alexandria, p. 72. 23. See Wegner, ‘Philo’s Portrayal of Women’, pp. 55-56. 24. Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 198 n. 16. 25. According to K.L. Gaca, the view that only purposive sex for procreation is justiﬁed is to be traced to Pythagorean thought, see her ‘Philo’s Principles of Sexual Conduct and their Inﬂuence on Christian Platonist Sexual Principles’, The Studia Philonica Annual 8 (1996), pp. 21-39. 26. Szesnat, ‘Pretty Boys’, pp. 94-101. Szesnat points out, interestingly, that despite Philo’s characterization of same-sex intercourse as the most extreme form of sexual
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Another point to note is that despite this negative presentation of the dangerous ‘feminine’ characteristics of the soul, that can even result in the ‘disease’ of males turning somewhat into females, there is something strangely powerful about the feminine in Philo’s construction. This has yet to be fully explored in terms of what he indicates about actual gender relations.27 While ostensibly the masculine element of the soul is superior to the feminine and ideally should be in control, the feminine element of the soul prevails over the masculine. In Philo’s construction of the soul, it is almost impossibly difﬁcult to throw off domination by sense-perception. Likewise, women are usually physically weaker than men (cf. Rer. Div. Her. 164), but women exercise control over men. Philo appears to situate male domination by women in women’s power to manipulate men on account of male sexual desire. The mind becomes the slave of sense-perception through sexual union, and therefore becomes trapped in an inferior realm (Leg. 2.50). Sense-perception deceives the mind by sly means (Op. Mund. 165). A wife deceives her husband by the same sly means in Philo’s construction of a marriage in which a man is completely at the mercy of his wife’s wicked wiles and is indeed a slave (Hypoth.11.14-17). Sense-perception is, however, not completely to be cast off, since it is a creation of God, and somehow also an important power of the soul, designed by God so that the mind might contemplate both material and immaterial things (Cher. 59-60; Congr. 21). It should simply be kept in its right place. In terms of authority in society, men and women also had their right places. Men should control the more important public institutions, and the women should control the less important private ones (Spec. Leg. 3.169-71). There seems little place for the Roman-style paterfamilias in Philo’s domestic world. This fact may have been slightly overlooked because Philo tends to focus on the issue of modesty in Flacc. 89, and that issue is also prevalent in his presentation of women in Spec. Leg. 3.169-71. In addition, from our own perspective, we tend to see women in antiquity as being conﬁned to the home rather than in control of it. Philo traces the
desire (cf. Anim. 49; Abr. 135; Spec. Leg. 2.50) the ‘mad love’ for boys robs the boys (not the men who penetrate them) of a0ndrei/a (‘manliness’) and that Philo’s concern here is not even with citizen boys but slaves (p. 99). Presumably the transgression of nature is so vile to Philo that the slave boys’ low social status is irrelevant. 27. Though this is recognized by Wegner, ‘Philo’s Portrayal of Women’, pp. 50-51, when she quotes Cher. 59-60 and points out that Philo’s true attitude to women may have been ambivalence ‘perhaps even cognitive dissonance’.
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administrative division set forth in Spec. Leg. 3.169-71 to Mosaic law, not common practice in society, and there seems no doubt that he considers it distinctively part of Judaism in its ideal state. The world is divided into a balance of male and female governance, but the male is given the upper hand in controlling the more important public dimensions of the nation. This should be reﬂected in the individual, where male aspects such as mind and reason should be in charge, and female aspects such as senseperception should be in control of less important functions. Despite Philo’s negative rhetoric in terms of the feminine, and apparent fears based on female authority in the household, he accepts the need for some female authority and acknowledges the value of the feminine dimensions of the soul. Women as Students of Moses There are various threads we may distinguish in the pattern of rhetoric found in De Vita Contemplativa that may provide clues for a historical picture. It is signiﬁcant that Philo speciﬁcally describes the members of the group as being ‘pupils’ or ‘disciples’ of Moses (Mwuse/wj gnwrimoi/, Vit. Cont. 63). In including women in the group, Philo implicitly includes them also in this designation, which is, in Philo’s terms, extremely ﬂattering and signiﬁcant. This term does not refer only to the small group of Therapeutae living outside Alexandria that Philo focuses upon in the text, but is much more general. For Philo this term was linked with those who practiced an allegorical interpretation of Scripture that was thought to have been passed down from Moses to the present day.28 These are people who are ‘following the philosophy of Moses’ (Mut. Nom. 223), and ‘the pupils of the most excellent philosophy’ (Virt. 65). The one who is taught by Moses can be called a scholar (foithth/j), pupil (gnw/rimoj) or student (maqhth/j) of God (Sacr. 79). Philo compares the learning of a pupil of God with drinking water drawn from a well (Poster. C. 146-52). It is this form of interpretation that is superior to all others. This identiﬁes the group of Therapeutae Philo describes as being part of the wider allegorical school of thought that Philo himself belonged to in Alexandria, though not one with which he would fully agree, as we shall
28. Det. Pot. Ins. 86; Poster. C. 12; Conf. Ling. 39; Vit. Mos. 2.205; Spec. Leg. 1.319, 345; 2.88, 256; Hypoth. 11.1; Heres 81; Quaest. in Gen. 3.8. See David Hay, ‘Philo’s References to Other Allegorists’, Studia Philonica 6 (1979–80), pp. 41-75 (45).
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see. If women were included in the group and the group collectively were among the ‘disciples of Moses’ found in Alexandrian society, then women were part of the school of allegorical exegesis in Alexandria. Did they study Scripture only in this one little group? In Fug. 55 and 58 Philo says he went for instruction to a wise woman named Skepsis (whose name means ‘consideration’), who personiﬁes insight gained through the allegorical exegesis of Scripture. While it would be rash to assume that an actual woman called Skepsis existed, this image must have been based on real models of female teachers for it not to appear utterly ridiculous. In other words, some of the Jewish women Philo deﬁnes in Alexandria as being modest and yet in control of the home may well have been studying a sophisticated allegorical form of biblical interpretation, the highest type of philosophy as Philo deﬁned it, and indeed teaching this philosophy. We know there were Pythagoraean female philosophers and teachers in Alexandria at this time;29 it would not have been unlikely in the social context of this city that some sectors of the Hellenized Jewish community produced women teachers and students also. Might it have been a positive point to show that women were among those who followed the perfect philosophy of Moses? It is extremely unlikely. Women philosophers and students of philosophers as evidenced in Hellenistic and Roman literature were not in general considered positive motifs in the presentation of a philosophical school; rather the reverse.30 In the (ﬁrst century BCE) essay by Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods (1.93), he ridicules Leontium’s reply to a work by Theophrastus, but the purpose is to undermine the Epicureans who would allow a ‘little whore’ to write such a piece.31 As noted by numerous authors, Aspasia was the subject of many comic writers’ attacks, on the very idea of a philosophical

29. For details, see Sarah Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt from Alexander to Cleopatra (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), pp. 61-71, and her chapter on Alexandrian women as a whole. 30. This point is made by Richard Hawley, ‘The Problem of Women Philosophers in Ancient Greece’, in Leonie Archer, Susan Fischler and Maria Wyke (eds.), Women in Ancient Societies: ‘An Illusion of the Night’ (London: Macmillan, 1994). For compilations of material on women philosophers in antiquity see Mary Ellen Waithe (ed.), A History of Women Philosophers: Ancient Women Philosophers 600 B.C.–500 A.D. (Dordrecht: Martinus Mijhoff, 1987), and for a seventeenth-century view see Gilles Ménage, Historia Mulierum Philosopharum (History of Women Philosophers) (ed. and trans. Beatrice H. Zedler; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984). 31. Hawley, ‘The Problem of Women Philosophers’, p. 80.
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woman.32 This motif is also found in Juvenal’s Satires.33 In satiric comedies of the fourth century BCE by Cratinus the Elder and Alexis, a woman who practices the philosophical regimen of Pythagoras exempliﬁes the sheer ridiculousness of the system.34 Diogenes Laertius includes a humorous tradition of the ‘origin’ of women students of Pythagoras that at the same time undermines the possibility that women may have chosen the philosophy seriously or independently. He states that according to a rather comic story by Hermippus, Pythagoras made a cave dwelling deep in the earth, setting his mother to guard the entrance and tell him of what happened above, and when he eventually came out he told everyone he had been down to Hades and read out a story of his experiences. The gullible men who heard this outside the cave were so affected they wailed and wept and considered him divine. In awe, they gave their wives to him (sexual implication present) in the hope that they might learn something from him, and ‘so they were called Pythagoreans [fem.]’ (Lives 8.41). This story makes the women completely passive, sexual objects for Pythagoras to use, and describes Pythagoras as a charlatan and sexual opportunist. It depicts the men as utter idiots and the original female Pythagoreans as no better than prostitutes, in terms of the standards of the day. The motif of women as philosophers per se would probably not have been invented to promote the group under discussion, for it could as well be used to undermine it, given that women were stereotypically considered weak-headed. In Philo’s other idealizing description of a Jewish philosophical school—the Essenes—there are no women (Omn. Prob. Lib. 75-91; cf. Hypoth. 11.14-18). He does not need them to make this group ideal. We might expect, then, that Philo’s tone in regard to the inclusion of women in his group outside Alexandria might be slightly apologetic. He has decided to use this group as an example of perfection. He has to include women because they were there, and he makes a virtue out of the necessity.35 Philo had to deal with the ‘Leontium factor’ in his presentation of the philosophical women of De Vita Contemplativa. The sexual activities of female philosophers was a much-used trope in a certain range of discourse about philosophers. How could a woman be philosophical and yet good in
32. Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.122.3; Plutarch, Pericles 24.6. 33. Satires 6.434-36. 34. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.37. 35. Hay, ‘Things Philo Said’, p. 674; Sly, ‘Philo’s Alexandria’, p. 145; Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 196.
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terms of what was expected of a respectable, well-born, ‘free’ lady of high social standing? There are some prototypes to which Philo may have turned. The truly good women philosophers do not traverse social boundaries or challenge accepted societal understandings of gender. Despite the story summarized above, Pythagoraean women are the leading examples of this type of model: the two Theanos, Phyntis, Perictione, Myia and others. In extant literature, they are fully maqh/triai (‘disciples’) of Pythagoras, but this does not mean they behave in identical ways to the male disciples. The women disciples are located within the domestic sphere as wives and mothers, even when they taught. Pleasing the husband was thought to be a special part of the correct way of life for a Pythagoraean woman.36 Modesty was a critical feature that indicated their philosophical correctness.37 The same situation applied in Stoic philosophy. While ﬁrst-century men in a Roman context knew of Stoic women who were indeed behaving in a way that was deemed not socially appropriate for women—or even offensive—the ideal Stoic woman was modest and domestic. Such is the rhetoric of Musonius Rufus, when he addresses the question of the philosophical woman.38 In Philo’s description of women in the community of De Vita Contemplativa, they are not obviously ‘domesticated’ in the manner of female Pythagoreans or ideal Stoic women. They appear to have abandoned the world of domesticity and procreation in order to embrace a life centered on spiritual exercises. It is hard to believe that Philo is presenting the women of this community as the Jewish equivalent of Pythagoraean women philosophers, whose locus was very much within the household, or an ideal that would be recognized as instantly good by Stoics, or anyone else. In leaving the household to live an ascetic life of few possessions, the women Therapeutae may seem closer to the model of Hipparchia the Cynic, wife of Crates.39 However, Hipparchia was considered an exceptional
36. Plutarch, Moralia 145. 37. Clement, Strom. 4.121.2; Diogenes Laertius, Lives 8.43; Theodoret, Therapeutike 12.73; Plutarch, Moralia 142D. 38. See Hawley, ‘The Problem of Women Philosophers’, p. 75. For Greek text of Musonius with English translations see Cora E. Lutz, Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947), and, in particular, the discussion on women (pp. 39-49). 39. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 96-98; see also Epictetus, Discourses 3.22.76; Theodoret, Therapeutike 12.49; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 4.19.121.6, Antipater of Sidon, Anthology 3.12.52; Suidas, ‘Hipparchia’, PG 117.1275.
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woman, a female Crates, and a very ambiguous ﬁgure for a role model. Despite her asceticism, she was sexualized in traditions concerning her: she was the epitome of a loose woman, outrageous and unique. It is highly unlikely that Philo would have commended his female Therapeutae to anyone by arguing that they were in any way like this Cynic woman. Rather, he seems to be very aware that the women he describes would face the criticism of being undomestic. They are a rhetorical problem. In fact, Philo tends to forget, conveniently, that women are there in the group at all in several places. He writes, regarding the Therapeutae in general, of the ‘superlative virtue of the men (tw~n andrw~n)’ (Vit. Cont. 1, cf. 78). These men leave behind their property (13) and ‘brothers/sisters (a)delfou/j), children, wives, parents, numerous relatives…’ (18). The community also uses the writings of ‘the men of old (palaiw~n a0ndrw~n)’ (29). But sooner or later it seems he must address the women. How could he make them ‘good’? Philo seems to have had in mind that the portrayal of the people he presents in De Vita Contemplativa would eclipse any description of an ideal philosophical group of the Graeco-Roman world. He alludes to philosophical ‘heroes’ of the Greek tradition (cf. Vit. Cont. 14-17, 53-63), who turn out to be not very heroic at all. He seems in particular to wish to eclipse the Pythagoreans and the Platonists: God is ‘better than a “Good” and purer than a “one” and older than a “Monad” ’ (Vit. Cont. 2).40 The fairly strong tradition of women within both the Pythagoraean school and the Platonic academy41 may have given him a precedent, but we do indeed feel his discomfort, and apologetic tone, when he introduces the women in the text. He stresses that they have ‘the same zeal and purpose as the men’ (32), that they are very modest (33), and that they are in fact ‘mostly elderly virgins’ (68) who have renounced attachment to physical reproduction. They are certainly not courtesans. They are completely proper, modest and chaste: models of femininity. Women as ‘Mothers’ of the Congregation However, models of femininity should also be in some way maternal, like the Pythagorean philosopher Theano, and so it is not surprising to ﬁnd that in De Vita Contemplativa the elder women are described by Philo as
40. Hay, ‘Things Philo Said’, p. 678. 41. Waithe, Women Philosophers, pp. 68-71; Hawley, ‘The Problem of Women Philosophers’, pp. 73-74; cf. Diogenes Laertius, Lives 3.1, 46; 4.2; Plato, Ep. 12.
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being ‘mothers’. The junior members who manage the day-to-day running of the community consider the ‘elders’42 of the congregation to be ‘their parents in common, more closely connected with them than by blood’ (Vit. Cont. 72). This is the basis of the extremely loving relations Philo notes, and the lack of subservience among the junior members who wait at table as dia&konoi. He writes: ‘They are just like real children who are affectionately glad to be of service to fathers and mothers’ (72) and ‘they fulﬁll the requirements of servants not by compulsion or by enduring orders, but, with voluntary free will they anticipate quickly and willingly (any) requests’ (71). This language is useful for Philo’s rhetoric but may also reﬂect the actual hierarchy of the group if we assume that Philo is weaving his rhetoric out of genuine observations. The identiﬁcation of the elder women as mothers is important not only because it enables Philo to insist that these women fulﬁll the role of ‘good women’ in normatively gendered society, but because in terms of the actual group a ‘mother’ role would have provided them with status. This is not Philo’s concern, but in much of the ancient world, as in the world today, a woman’s status in a given community was connected with her being a mother. This was the case also in the Jewish community in antiquity, in which the status of a mother in family and community appears to have been quite high. The status of a mother along with a father in the ancient Israelite household is afﬁrmed in Deut. 5.16; Exod. 20.12; cf. Lev. 19.3. A child who strikes either father or mother is liable to punishment (Exod. 21.15, 17). Proverbs 1.8 and 6.20 exhorts children to listen and adhere to the teaching of both father and mother.43 In the household, children would have expected to learn from both parents and obey them. Deborah is called ‘Mother in Israel’, a designation of her divinely ordained leadership of the nation (Judg. 5.7).44 In a non-Jewish
42. Those who had been involved longer in the practice of the ascetic and contemplative life, not necessarily actually old people (Vit. Cont. 67). 43. For a discussion of mothers in Israel see Carol Meyers, Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 150-52. 44. Meyers, Discovering Eve, pp. 159-60. Meyers also notes that the northern Israelite city of Abel is called ‘a mother in Israel’ (2 Sam. 20.19) and conjectures that it may have been an oracular center. It was where a wise woman resolves a crisis concerning David’s general Joab (2 Sam. 14.1-24). See also Rachel Adler, ‘ “A Mother in Israel”: Aspects of the Mother-Role in Jewish Myth’, in Rita M. Gross (ed.), Beyond Androcentrism (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1977), pp. 237-55 (246-49); J. Cheryl Exum, ‘Mother in Israel: A Familiar Story Reconsidered’, in Letty M. Russell (ed.), Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 73-85.
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context we have Tata of Aphrodisias (second century CE) described as being a ‘mother’ of the city.45 In Jewish contexts, a woman of high status or donor who played an important leadership role in the life of the community and synagogue might be deemed ‘mother of the synagogue’ in inscriptions (Corpus Inscriptionem Judaicarum 523; 496; 166; 639).46 The ‘mothers’ of the congregation are referred to also in a fragmentary text within the Dead Sea Scrolls corpus (4Q270 7.1.14). Therefore, if the elder women Therapeutae were understood to be mothers that was a way of enhancing their honour within the community. We may suppose that the junior members of the congregation sought to learn and obey the elders: their fathers and mothers in common. This was a kind of household. Let us try to reach behind Philo’s rhetoric to see if we can draw out a little more of the historical situation. On a practical side, the elder women of the congregation are looked after by the junior members of the community (both male and female) as children looked after an elder matron in the household (Vit. Cont. 71-72), though they do far more menial tasks than real children in the household, who would not have waited on tables. If the domestic household in the city was run by women, the elder matron is likely to have been the one to whom people looked for guidance and authority in all matters which had a bearing on the life of the members of the household. It would follow here, then, that the elder women, in charge of this household, would then have been looked to for guidance and leadership. These ‘mothers’ of the congregation do not engage in the domestic work of the community Philo describes. This work is undertaken by the ‘junior’ members of the congregation, who take the place of slaves in the elite dwelling (Vit. Cont. 70-72), but the juniors are treated by the elders not as slaves but as children, and they treat those whom they serve as fathers and mothers. The mothers of the congregation do not do traditional women’s labour, though it should be remembered that elite women did not do domestic work either. The female junior member of this congregation could look forward to the same status as a senior mother within a household when she progressed. She did not need to feel bereft of physical
45. Ross Kraemer, Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 86, 120-21; see also CIJ 100; 738. 46. See Bernadette J. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (BJS, 36; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982), pp. 63-70.
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children, who would respect and maintain her, for she would in due course have her own children in common with the other elders: new junior members who came into the congregation. In other words, Philo’s rhetoric regarding elder women Therapeutae may aim to make them safe and good by noting that they are mothers—as the men are fathers—but in the actual group Philo describes (if he reﬂects their practices accurately) the designation ‘mother’ would have indicated status, not necessarily ‘goodness’. Celibacy The issue of women’s maternal role in society is obviously a concern to Philo, and it is linked with issues of sexuality in general. He needs to make a case for the celibacy of the group he describes while yet afﬁrming this quasi-maternal role for the women devotees of God. Not only do the elder women (‘mothers’) of the congregation have the junior members as children, Philo theorizes that their souls also bring forth spiritual children. The soul becomes ‘mother of a large family’ when a soul returns to a virginal state, receives the divine seed, and then produces the perfect children: prudence, courage, temperance, justice, holiness, piety and other virtues and dispositions (Praem. Poen. 159-60).47 Szesnat points out that this deﬁnition of spiritual children is particularly important in regard to the women, since Philo has already stated that men leave children behind (Vit. Cont. 13, 18) and therefore they, and not the women, have fulﬁlled their proper duties of procreation.48 Philo describes the women at the symposium in this way:
Women eat together (here) also. They are mostly elderly virgins. They strongly maintain the purity not out of necessity, as some of the priestesses of the Greeks (do) but out of their own free will, because of a zeal and a yearning for Wisdom, which they are eager to live with. They take no heed of the pleasures of the body, and desire not a mortal offspring, but an immortal one, which only a soul which is loved by God is able to give birth to, by itself, because the Father has sown in it lights of intelligence which enable her to see the doctrines of Wisdom. (Vit. Cont. 68)

Philo himself may have been uncomfortable about the permanent virginity of the women he describes, because of his belief that people were obligated to ‘multiply’ in order to fulﬁll the command of God, as Szesnat

47. See Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories, pp. 51-53. 48. Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 197.
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also notes.49 We ﬁnd this view of Philo indicated in his comments on the obligation to divorce a barren woman, where he kindly takes pity on men who continue to be married to their barren wives from force of familiarity, but has no sympathy—rather, outright condemnation—for men who marry women who have previously been shown to be barren (Spec. Leg. 3.3234). Because, in fact, it is important to procreate, Philo stresses that the women devotees are mothers not only to the adopted juniors but to spirit children within their virginal souls. The women devotees have the immortal offspring which Philo deﬁnes elsewhere as virtues and dispositions (Fug. 51-2). Philo’s assertion that the women of this group were ‘mostly aged virgins’ (plei~stai ghraiai\ parqe/noi) is in itself rather problematic. In terms of Philo’s society, there was a fundamental status shift that affected females: up until marriage they were parqe/noi (‘virgins’). With sex/marriage, they became gu/nai (‘women’). Philo uses this terminology metaphorically in relation to the soul, and ascribes a positive value to the state of virginity and a negative value to the state of post-sex womanhood. For example, Philo writes in his description of Sarah that with ordinary sexual relations (upon marriage) virgins are turned into women but when God begins to consort with the soul he makes what was before a woman into a virgin again (Cher. 50; cf. Quaest. in Exod. 2.3; Somn. 2.185). The soul itself should be virginal in order to ascend towards union with God. The soul, ostensibly female in Greek (yu~ch/), needs to rid itself of the encumbrance of materialistic feminization in order to become a virgin: a higher spiritual state (Cher. 50; Praem. Poen. 159-60).50 The number seven is itself a ‘virgin’, motherless, begotten by the Father, as an ideal male form without the female (Leg. Gai. 1.15; cf. Rer. Div. Her. 170, 216; Vit. Mos. 2.210; Quaest. in Gen. 2.12). It is interesting to remember that when Philo addresses the signiﬁcance of Miriam singing in the story of Exodus, he describes her as representing sense-perception that has been made ‘pure and clean’ (Agr. 80), perhaps then also virginal. Is it possible then for real women to become like Sarah or Miriam, renewed virgins? By denying their sexual physiology could women ascend to a higher (more masculine) spiritual status, ‘female in form only’, as

49. Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 193; cf. Praem. Poen. 108-109; Det. Pot. Ins. 147-48. 50. Baer, Philo’s Use of the Categories, pp. 45-53.
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Ross Kraemer put it?51 With the older women’s absence of menstruation, were they also rendered pure and clean, virgins again? Despite the ambiguity of the language Philo uses, it seems unlikely that Philo would consider that real women could become virgins again in terms of their actual social or physical status or even that celibacy in itself was a condition for spiritual excellence or the bearing of soul-children. His description of Sarah seems designed to surprise the reader, to provoke an awareness of how spiritual things can work so very differently from material ones. Celibacy itself does not make women virgins again in body, and even less, honorary males.52 Philo’s comments about the maternal capacity of the pure, virginal soul is one thing, but he does not link it with celibacy per se as an absolute pre-requisite. Livia develops masculinity in her faculty of reason as a wife, married to the exemplary Augustus (Leg. Gai. 319). However, insofar as celibacy is a condition resulting from control of sense-perception, then it perhaps indicates virginity and purity of the soul which has been uncorrupted by (feminine) sense-perception. This is the case for both males and females. The division between what was possible for the soul and what was possible for the body in terms of renewed virginity needs to be recognized here. If it suited him, Philo could throw away the constraints of earth-bound gendered language to explain spiritual realities in a way that is designed to bamboozle his readers into awareness of the conundrums of spiritual truth exactly because the world of spirit simply did not behave like the world of material things. Philo’s imagery is therefore inconsistent and at times contradictory. As we have seen, in Philo’s symbolic construction the female state is passive, material, bodily, sense perceptible, while the male is active, rational, incorporeal and more like mind and thought (Quaest. in Gen. 1.8). The virgin soul really indicates a kind of masculinized soul. As partially or fully masculinized, the soul can unite with a feminized God: Sophia or Wisdom.53 In Fug. 52, Sophia, the daughter of God, is also masculine and is herself ‘father’ who can sow and beget in souls aptness to learn, education, knowledge, wisdom, good and praiseworthy actions. This is precisely what is taking place here in Philo’s description of Vit. Cont. 68: God and Wisdom are essentially the same. But here Philo stays with
51. Kraemer, ‘Monastic Jewish Women’, pp. 353, 356. See also Mattila, ‘Wisdom’, p. 107. 52. See Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 195. 53. For an exploration of the motif see Richard A. Horsley, ‘Spiritual Marriage with Sophia’, VC 33 (1979), pp. 30-54.
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the terminology of the male ‘God’ rather than the female ‘Sophia’, to tie the language to the sex of the women he discusses. They are—in terms of the body—mostly virgins. He then jumps to consider the fruits of a virgin soul; the soul here remains feminine, passive, and gives birth to ‘immortal offspring’, or more particularly a male perceptive faculty—intelligence— which enables her (the soul, the woman) to see, by its lights, the doctrines of Sophia/Wisdom. The feminine soul of the woman remains and God ‘sows seed’ as a masculine subject in order to create a masculine faculty. This model has parallels in various other passages among Philo’s writings, and Philo could have said the same about the male devotees.54 But then, having replicated bodily gender in the soul, he suddenly switches the gender of the divine by stating that the women want to live with Sophia/ Wisdom. Had the subjects been male, the sexual metaphor would have been more obvious. As Richard Horsley states:
The metaphors are mixed, or rather the ‘persons’ in the spiritual intercourse are mixed…(b)ut more is involved than mere metaphor. The abstention from normal sexual relations…is connected with and occurs because of a higher spiritual marriage with Sophia. The intense and exclusive contemplation of the divine mate leaves no time, energy or interest for any of the normal social or marital relations.55

What of the situation of the historical Therapeutae, after all these gymnastics? Philo has smoothly quick-stepped the reader away from seeing the real women of the group towards considering the productivity of their virginal souls. It is actually unclear whether Philo means to refer to ‘mostly elderly’ virgins (that is, all virgins, most of whom are aged), or ‘mostly virgins’ who are elderly (that is, mostly virgins, who all happen to be elderly), or both (that is, they are mostly virgins, most of whom are also elderly). It may be best to read the word plei=stai as governing both adjective and noun, so that we leave open the possibility that there were women in the group who were (1) not virgins and (2) not old. As Szesnat points out, Philo generally uses the word gu/nai to refer to the female devotees, not

54. In Spec. Leg. 2.30 the Logos impregnates the soul with excellent thoughts; in Poster. C. 135 God impregnates ‘Leah’ with the seed of Wisdom and she brings forth beautiful ideas. In Cher. 42-49 God’s seed is ‘the seed of happiness’; see Horsley, ‘Spiritual Marriage’, pp. 35-37. 55. Horsley, ‘Spiritual Marriage’, p. 43. Kraemer reads this differently, as indicating that ‘they had purged their souls of their feminine elements and become male and/ or virgin’, see Kraemer, ‘Monastic Jewish Women’, p. 353.
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parqe/noi.56 Ross Kraemer wonders if the lack of any mention of husbands being left in Philo’s discussion as most likely indicating that the women of the community had not ever married.57 However, if we focus on the exceptions not covered under the umbrella of ‘mostly’, we should note that some women in the community had indeed married and were not elderly. In some ways Philo’s sudden insistence that readers visualize the women as virgins is a smokescreen to avoid direct discussion of the tricky issue of celibacy. Let us consider this closely. Philo wrote that the Therapeutae leave their wives behind (Vit. Cont. 17) in their quest for the contemplative life. In other words, it is a condition of all men here that they were to be celibate. But, in terms of the women, Philo could not perhaps have written that they leave their husbands and still have them considered ‘good’. He discusses their virginity rather than celibacy, and side-tracks the focus even further by stressing that this is self-chosen virginity rather than anything inﬂicted upon the women by others, thereafter jumping into a discussion of the fruitful virginal soul. The conclusion is that these virgins are superior. But Philo actually avoids discussing the issue of the non-virgin celibate women and, moreover, men. What Philo says in terms of sexuality in regard to the women of the community certainly applies just as much to the men. Because of Philo’s automatic linkage of women with issues of sexuality, he is prompted to allude to celibacy in regard to the community as a whole when he begins to discuss women, but without addressing it directly. In the context of his essay, spiritual conception and birth functions also as a substitution for the physical conception and birth women experience when in their usual, married state. For these virgins, they are fulﬁlled as proper women through this spiritual birth facilitated by God. Philo appears to be addressing an audience who may object that the virgins here are not fulﬁlling their womanly roles;58 Philo says they do, in that their souls have been impregnated by God. However, we may be able to surmise that Philo’s rhetoric was not just a case of pure apologetics. It is possible that the notion of being spiritually fruitful was itself one that the community understood and accepted. The origins of the ‘spiritually-fruitful celibate’ ideal are to be found both in the
56. Szesnat, ‘ “Mostly Aged Virgins” ’, p. 196. 57. Kraemer, ‘Monastic Jewish Women’, pp. 352-53. 58. Philo’s argument enables him to come to terms with a practice which was for him otherwise contradictory to the commandment of God to multiply (Gen. 1.28).
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LXX and in Plato.59 In Wis. 3.13 it is stated that a ‘barren’ woman who has

remained sexually chaste ‘will have fruit at the visitation of souls’. The parallel passage dealing with the good ‘barren’ man—a righteous eunuch— gives his reward as ‘a most desirable portion in the temple of the Lord’ (3.14). This latter promise goes back to Isa. 56.3-5, where it is stated that no eunuch should say: ‘Behold, I am a dried-up tree’, that is, one who cannot bear any fruit, for YHWH states that the righteous eunuchs will be given ‘in my house and in my walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. I shall give them an eternal name that will never be erased.’ The spiritual ‘child’ here is imagined as a kind of stone monument with their name inscribed indelibly forever.60 In terms of its construction, Wisdom adds to Isaiah’s promise another aspect that is speciﬁcally addressed to women who can have no children, promising similar spiritual ‘fruit’. The Therapeutae may have accepted Wisdom’s promise, and— reading allegorically—may have brought this promise of future fruit forward in time, so that now those who participate in the community do not desire mortal but immortal offspring in their present experience. However, Philo elsewhere accepts without question the LXX exclusion of eunuchs from the assembly of Israel (Deut. 23.11 in Spec. Leg. 1.325)61 and the divine rule that one must produce physical children (Praem. Poen. 108109; Det. Pot. Ins. 147-48). If it was not Philo’s own view that celibacy as such could be wholly justiﬁed on the basis of spiritual fruit, he may, tangentially, be using the arguments of the Therapeutae themselves to justify their own practice. This must remain hypothetical, but it would have been reasonable for them to claim that total abstinence from engagement in sense-perception and the rejection of all bodily pleasures (sw~ma h9donw~n) rendered their souls free to unify with God and thereby bear spiritual fruit. Philo can only go so far along this track, because he does not believe in extremism (cf. Migr. 86-96). For the sake of his rhetoric, Philo applied the same imagery that the group used to justify celibacy for everyone to the
59. V.E.F. Harrison, ‘The Allegorization of Gender: Plato and Philo on Spiritual Childbearing’, in V.L. Wimbush and R. Valentasis (eds.), Asceticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 520-34. The similar notion that ‘bearing good fruit’ indicates righteousness is found also in the New Testament (cf. Lk. 3.8-9) and rabbinic literature (cf. Gen. R. 16.3). 60. Cf. Mt. 19.12 where Jesus talks of ‘eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven’, possibly implying that those who live celibate lives give up the hope of mortal offspring for anticipated spiritual rewards in the Kingdom. 61. See Szesnat, ‘Pretty Boys’, p. 100.
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case of the women only. The way we read it, then, it is these (virginal) women who bear spiritual fruit. Philo’s employment of the theory of the fruitful celibate is then used strategically in regard to gender issues—since it is there to show the women in a positive (maternal) light—and in regard to side-tracking the focus from the group’s celibacy as a whole. As we saw, the women’s own choice of a virgin lifestyle is also used to score points in Philo’s schema. Philo mentions that continued virginity is found among ‘the Greeks’ but disparagingly puts down the virginity of Greek priestesses as being done ‘out of necessity’ (Vit. Cont. 68). Philo can appeal to a positive view of certain virgin lifestyles in wider Hellenistic and Roman culture. Virginity appears to have been esteemed as a means to achieve a greater access to the world of the spirit and the divine, as in the case of the Vestal Virgins at Rome, and was part of a wider rubric which Judith Gundry-Volf deﬁnes as ‘inspiration asceticism’.62 The Pythia at Delphi had to be a virgin in order to prophesy.63 According to Diodorus (16.26) this is because virgins had their natural innocence intact like the virgin goddess Artemis (who is a kind of warrior or guardian), and could then also guard the secrecy of the disclosures.64 A woman who prophesies at the temple of Apollo in Corinth in the second century is celibate (Pausanias, Descriptio Graeciae 2.24.1), and other Apollo prophetesses are virgins (Euripides, Troad. 41-42; Lycophron, Alex. 348-64; Herodotus 1.182). Certain sibyls are called virgins (Virgil, Aen. 3.443-45; 6.42-45; Ovid, Metam. 14.129-53; Lycophron, Alex. 1278-79; Pausanias 10.12.6). Celibacy, of course, is a wider category than virginity and, as noted above, this seems to have been more the focus of the group itself than (women’s) virginity. Given the use of the term qerapeutai/ for the group of De Vita Contemplativia and the term’s linkage with the devotees of Serapis and Isis,65 it is interesting that in the cult of Isis abstinence from
62. Judith Gundry-Volf, ‘Celibate Pneumatics and Social Power: On the Motivations for Sexual Asceticism in Corinth’, USQR 48 (1994), pp. 105-26. 63. So Plutarch, Def. Or. 51; cf. Pyth. Or. 22. See Gundry-Volf, ‘Celibate Pneumatics’, pp. 110-11, basing herself on E. Fehrle, Die kultische Keuschheit im Altertum (Giessen: Alfred Töpelmann, 1910), pp. 76-97. 64. See Gundry-Volf, ‘Celibate Pneumatics’, p. 122 n. 30. 65. See the analysis in Taylor and Davies, ‘The So-Called “Therapeutae” ’, pp. 3-6. Ladislav Vidman, Sylloge inscriptionum religionis Isiacae et Sarapiacae (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1969), p. 161 no. 314 (the inscription is dated ﬁrst–second century CE); p. 158 no. 307 (marble stele dated to ﬁrst–second centuries CE); p. 46 no. 102 (dated c. 117 CE); p.163 nos. 318 and 319 (probably to be dated to the ﬁrst century CE) and cf. p.
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carnal pleasure is essential for the reception of the sacred word (Plutarch, Is. et Os. 351F-52C, Apuleius, Met. 6.19-21). The link between spiritual excellence and celibacy appears to have inﬂuenced Jewish praxis and belief by at least the ﬁrst century BCE. In terms of virginity, the Testament of Job (46-53), probably dated to the ﬁrst century CE, contains the interesting story of Job’s three virgin daughters—Jemimah, Keziah and Kerenhappuch—who have ecstatic visions upon donning parts of his special spark-shooting girdle which enables prophetic power to come upon the wearer (47.9). This prophetic power is manifested in ‘sending up a hymn to God in accord with the way angels sing hymns’ (48.2-3).66 The emphasis on celibacy as a factor which enhances spiritual achievement is found in 4 Ezra (5.13, 20, 31; 6.29-35; 9.23-24; 12.50–13.20) and 2 Baruch (9.1–10.3; 12.5–13.3; 20.5–21.3; 47.2–48.1).67 According to both Philo and rabbinic sources, Moses became celibate after his call from God (Vit. Mos. 2.68-69; b. Šab. 67a), even though there is a later critique of his marital celibacy in the midrash (Sifre Num. 12.1).68 In the midrash, there is a comment attributed to Tzipporah when a youth shouts ‘Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!’ (Num. 11.28): she says, ‘Woe to the wives of these!’ The assumption is that they will no longer have sex with their wives.69 Daniel Boyarin suggests that the model of Moses’ celibacy was a powerful received tradition by rabbinic times, and the rabbis needed to explain it as an exception rather than the rule for people of exemplary
113 nos. 200 and 201 from Lindus (dated to the third century CE) where there are references to ta\n qerapei/an tw~n i0erw~n tou~ Sara/pioj.; Pierre Roussel, Les cultes égyptiens à Délos du IIIe au 1er siècle avant J.-C. (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1916) nos. 3, 21, 105, 115, 117, 151, 160, 164, 175, cf. nos. 2, 41, 42. 66. See Randall D. Chesnut, ‘Revelatory Experiences Attributed to Biblical Women in Early Jewish Literature’, Levine (ed.), ‘Women Like This’, pp. 107-26. 67. Gundry-Volf also notes (‘Celibate Pneumatics’, p. 123 n. 38) that in Exod. 19.15 the people of Israel are to be celibate for three days prior to YHWH’s descent on Mount Sinai. 68. See for discussion Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (London: SCM Press, rev. edn, 1983), pp. 99-102. For discussion of the midrash, see Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkley: University of Califormia Press, 1993), pp. 160-65. The passage is interpreted here as indicating that Miriam spoke on behalf of the Ethiopian woman (= Tzipporah) whom Moses was sexually neglecting. For a different interpretation see Bernard P. Robinson ‘The Jealousy of Miriam: A Note on Num 12’, ZAW 101.3 (1989), pp. 428-32. 69. See Boyarin, Carnal Israel, p. 162. Boyarin contrasts this attitude with a certain Babylonian school that advocated extended periods of celibacy for men to study Torah.
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holiness, in order to discourage the practice. The midrash uses God’s statement that he spoke with Moses ‘mouth to mouth’ as indicating his unique position in regard to sexuality that should not be copied. In this state he is either like the angels, or only slightly below them.70 Christian women in Pauline churches adopted celibacy to enhance prophetic power and communion with angels (1 Cor. 7.1-40), a notion possibly derived from contemporary Judaism, or Paul himself.71 There seems to have been an assumption that celibacy improved both prayer and prophecy: that is, the lines of communication between Heaven and Earth. Paul suggests periodic celibacy for devotion to prayer (1 Cor. 7.5), probably towards a speciﬁc purpose. Given all this, the Therapeutae would be in good company in linking celibacy with spiritual practices. To conclude, I will return brieﬂy to consideration of the wider milieu in which the Therapeutae and Philo both moved—the circles in Alexandria— in which allegorical exegesis was studied. We get an allusion to this wider context of people supportive of the lifestyle of the Therapeutae in Vit. Cont. 67, where, regarding the distinction between ‘elders’ and ‘juniors’, Philo states:
The (‘elders’) are those who from early youth have matured and grown up in the contemplative part of philosophy, which indeed is the most beautiful and godly.

A girl growing up from early youth (that is, from childhood) with such (allegorical) instruction might well have made the decision to join a group such as that described by Philo. Philo notes that these women had decided themselves to enter this community and take on a lifetime of celibacy. It was not a decision imposed upon them, as in the case of the Vestal Virgins of Rome, or other cults in which the commitment of a daughter to a life of celibacy was made by the family, often by the father alone. It is also worth bearing in mind that the Christian apostle Paul may imagine that it is the norm for the father to decide whether his daughter will remain a virgin or

70. Boyarin, Carnal Israel, pp. 163-64. 71. See Gundry-Volf, ‘Celibate Pneumatics’, and idem, ‘Controlling the Bodies: A Theological Proﬁle of the Corinthian Sexual Ascetics’, in R. Bieringer (ed.), The Corinthian Correspondence (BETL, 125; Leuven: Leuven University Press/Peeters, 1996), pp. 499-521; Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1985), pp. 160-41; Antionette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), pp. 116-34.
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Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23 (2002)

not, rather than the girl herself (1 Cor. 7.36-38),72 and Paul himself can quite unselfconsciously describe himself metaphorically as a father who has arranged a desirable marriage for his virgin daughter (2 Cor. 11.2), and expect his hearers to know exactly what he means. Early Christian texts about ascetic women can make high drama out of the ﬁerce opposition from family when the young woman herself rejects marriage in favour of being a disciple of an apostle: the assumption is that discipleship requires celibacy, and also that society was deeply hostile to any independent decision on the part of the young woman which would overturn her expected social role. There is a sense that she brings shame on the family by choosing a celibate lifestyle, rejecting their beliefs that marriage is her proper duty.73 There is no implication of any such familial trauma here; quite the opposite. The women grow up from childhood within the embrace of the philosophy that they continue to hold to. The women of this group appear to have chosen the contemplative, ascetic lifestyle as a result of their excellence in allegorical philosophy, previously learnt. In order for the women to make the choice to embrace a life of special devotion to God in this extreme form, they would need to have been studying the Jewish philosophy of the allegorical school for some time, supported by their families, who presumably continued to support them when they chose to live away from the city in a community devoted to an ascetic and isolated mode of life. Conclusions In approaching a text like De Vita Contemplativa, we can delve into points of dissonance between the rhetorical construction and historical reality. For example, on the basis of what Philo lets slip, we can distinguish among the historical (elder) women Therapeutae some who may never have married and others who had been married or were married still. We do not know the ratio. Both men and women in this group were celibate. Their goal may well have been to overcome the snares of sense-perception and bear spiritual fruit, which they believed was only possible through
72. This passage is sometimes translated so that the issue is between two people who are engaged rather than between a father and a virgin daughter. However, the fact that the man is actively giving in marriage (1 Cor. 7.38) must surely mean that the reference is to a father. A ﬁancé does not give his ﬁancée in marriage, he is given her. 73. See Virginia Burrus, ‘Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts’, Semeia 38 (1986), pp. 101-35.
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complete renunciation of all the body’s desires. The elder women had status within the community by being mothers to the junior members of the group. Philo makes his group acceptable to his own way of thinking by indicating that the men already had wives and children, thereby fulﬁlling the divine command to multiply. He does not indicate that the women left husbands or children. This may have been a socially unacceptable comment (that is, they would no longer be perceived as ‘that which is good’), but it also ﬁts in with his characterization of the women as being ‘mostly elderly virgins’. The men are celibate but have fulﬁlled the commandment to multiply in reproducing prior to their arrival in the group; the women are virgins. In order to satisfy his and society’s expectation of the maternal role of women, and also in order to justify their celibate lifestyle, Philo uses the image of the fruitful soul only in relation to the elder women. As well as this, he stresses that all the elder members of the community are fathers and mothers to the junior members, a matter that is particularly relevant in terms of characterizing the women as maternal. For Philo, everyone in the group must be deﬁned as ‘good’. When we become aware of how Philo addressed potential criticisms of the women of the group, we understand better how he has attempted to describe the women in a way that would avoid this. In terms of Philo’s presentation, gender remains and has not been blurred by spiritual achievement or by celibacy. However, importantly, here we ﬁnd Jewish women engaged in learning and contributing to the very heart of religion. Like their pagan contemporaries in Alexandria and elsewhere in the Graeco-Roman world, the intricacies of philosophy were not closed to them.

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