Was Plato just an imitator of Moses? Ancient thinkers argued exactly that.
In short: Ancient Jewish authors writing in Greek, such as Philo and Josephus, famously reframed Moses not just as a prophet, but as the ultimate lawgiver. By comparing him to Greek icons like Lycurgus and Solon, they elevated Moses as the original, superior architect of law, philosophy, and political order.
In the centuries surrounding the birth of Jesus, Jewish writers living in the Roman Empire sought to bridge the gap between their traditions and the dominant Greek intellectual culture. Figures like Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, who were deeply versed in both the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy, positioned Moses as a figure of unmatched stature. They argued that Moses was not only more ancient than the celebrated Greek lawgivers Lycurgus and Solon but also fundamentally more successful. While Plato’s laws remained theoretical constructs confined to philosophy, Moses had successfully embedded his laws into the daily reality of a living community.
The comparison often took a provocative turn. The pagan Platonist Numenius famously asked, 'What is Plato other than Moses speaking Attic?' This sentiment reflected a broader effort to frame Moses as the source of wisdom that Greeks later adopted. By portraying Moses as a polymath—king, priest, prophet, and philosopher—these authors argued that he achieved a level of ethical habituation that surpassed even the legendary discipline of the Spartans. This was not merely a historical claim about the life of Moses, but a sophisticated cultural synthesis emerging from the vibrant, Greek-speaking Jewish communities of the Second Temple period.
This intellectual project was rooted in the unique interplay of Jewish and Greek worlds. While archaic Greeks viewed law as a human product blessed by the divine, the Jewish tradition emphasized divine dictation, such as the laws received at Mount Sinai. By blending these perspectives, authors like Philo—who studied both the Septuagint and the works of Plato and the Stoics—created a new framework. They presented Moses as a figure who combined the best of both worlds, effectively claiming that the foundations of Greek political thought were indebted to the much earlier, divine revelations of the Hebrew tradition.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Divine Law, Human Prophet: Moses in Hebrew and Greek - Melissa Lane
- Also: Divine Law, Human Prophet: Moses in Hebrew and Greek
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