Complete Works of Philo Judaeus (Vol. 6)

the earth like a woman, when it is about to produce humans, so that the first-born might have suitable nourishment. But in truth, no river or spring anywhere in the inhabited world is ever recorded to have rained milk instead of water. Furthermore, just as the newborn needs to be nourished with milk, so too must it use the protection of clothing, because of the injuries that arise to the nurslings from 495 M. cold and heat; for this reason, midwives and mothers, upon whom the necessary care for the newborn falls, wrap the infants in swaddling clothes. How could one not immediately destroy those earth-born creatures if they were left naked, either by the chilling of the air or by the flame of the sun? For frost and heat, when they prevail, produce diseases and corruption. Since the myth-makers have once begun to disregard the truth, they have spun tales that those sown men grew up armed. For who was a coppersmith on earth, or such a Hephaestus the Greek god of fire and metalworking, as to provide them with full armor immediately? And what closeness was there to those first-born, who were like children? For man is the tamest of animals, as nature has gifted him with reason as a prize, by which even savage passions are charmed and tamed. It would have been much better to provide a herald’s staff a symbol of peace instead of weapons, symbols of reconciliatory truces for a rational nature, so that it might proclaim peace before war to all people everywhere.

§. 8. The trifles of those who wall off falsehood against the truth have thus been moderately refuted. It must be well known that from eternity, humans have sprouted from humans in succession, with the man sowing into the womb as if into a field, and the woman receiving the seeds safely, while nature invisibly fashions each of the parts of the body and soul, and, what each of us was unable to receive, she has gifted to the whole race, namely, immortality. For 946 P. while the individuals in their species perish, the work itself remains an object of wonder, truly divine and eternal. If man, a small part of the whole, is eternal, then surely the world is also unbegotten, and thus indestructible.