Introduction to Special Section : Philo's de Plantatione

[Extract] Since the beginning of the Philo of Alexandria seminar held at the Annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature for the first time in 1984,¹ it has been a frequent practice to focus a session on one of Philo’s works. The first of these, which took place in November 1985, was devoted to the Quaestiones in Genesin et Exodum and was separately published as monograph in the Brown Judaic Series.² Since then another twenty-one sessions have been held along these lines, generally comprising three or four papers on the treatise in question.³ From 1996 onwards, an important development took place. The previous year Gregory E. Sterling had announced the commencement of a projected series of critical commentaries on the major treatises of Philo.⁴ Starting the following year, sessions were devoted to works that were scheduled to appear in that series, which had received the name The Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series (PACS). The aim was to assist scholars preparing these commentaries. In 1996 the session discussed issues relating to the treatise De opificio mundi, and the Commentary appeared in 2001.⁵ From 2006 onwards the papers of four of these sessions have been published as Special sections in the pages of this Annual.6 The present Special section is the fifth in the series.