Philo of Byblos

Philo of Canaanite Gubla, called "Byblos" by Greeks, composed an ethnography of Phoenicia in Greek for a Hellenist audience.

His fellow Lebanese Porphyry of Tyre, countering Judaeo-Christianity, endorsed that one's "truest account concerning the Jews" in Against the Christians' fourth volume. I assume this De Judaeorum was one part of a larger project from which Porphyry picked out what he needed. Much like how Josephus had plucked out "Acts of the Diadochi" from Agatharch's history of the Eastern Med.

Eusebius of Maritime-Caesarea, yet another Canaanite and the Arian sort of Christian, picked out this Porphyry quote and a lot more, for his Praeparatio Evangelium. This was to support Judaeo-Christianity against Porphyry. Note that both Eusebius and Porphyry were Hypsistarians in their own way. You could say that in their approach to Philo they were bipartisan.

Philo claimed to have compiled his history from... very ancient sources. Intermittently he claimed to be doing nothing more than translate one "Sanchuniatho", which name is at least intelligible as honest Punic (Sakkunyaton, under late-classical Aramaisation *Sakkhunyathon). As it happens the extracts which Eusebius picks out from Philo don't actually discuss Judaism as such; they are purely Canaanite (see below). And for a long time Semitists scorned this Philo as a fraud.

It is difficult to fault these early-modern scholars. The isnad is a long one: Eusebius from Porphyry from Philo from Sakkhunyathon from a priest of Yaw (note Northern-Kingdom spelling: no hâ') writing under one Abi-Baal "king of Beirut". As kingdoms go, Beirut wasn't even noted as independent until the Hellenistic era. The tradition dates Abi-Baal to the Late Bronze Age but there are too many points where a quote might become paraphrase.

And as you have seen lately, I distrust "bipartisanship", which tends to be a conspiracy by interested parties to agree upon an enforceable dogma against the actual, you know, truth. A Lucian-style secularist and a dishonest Eunomian Christian could readily shake hands over the falsehood of Canaani religion. And this is what Philo offered: not an evangel of Canaani religion as Canaan lived it, but an argument that the Greek gods were false - because they were plagiaries of Canaani gods who were mere mortals whom ignorant Canaanites had raised to godhood. Philo despised his own people's religion. The watchword was "Euhemerism".

Philo and all his tradents might have been unfair; but enough of a record survived in Canaan that Philo could be verified, which Porphyry claimed he'd done - meaning, if Philo was a liar, then so was Porphyry. In our own times Ugarit happened and then Kumarbi happened after that. Since the middle 1930s we've been negotiating terms. I expect others have already mused about the analogy with Ptolemy of Mendes and "Man-Aton"; I know they've drawn parallels with Berossus. Albert Baumgarten published a "Commentary" in 1981 under Brill.

As a Byblian himself, living in a classical age, Philo met his "Canaanite" gods as very Egypt-influenced, well beyond what Ugarit had been following more purely in the Late Bronze Age. Among them is Thoth, for instance. And Egypt actually was Euhemerist: their Pharaohs claimed to be descended from Osiris who first farmed the Nile.

Overall I accuse Eusebius of bafflegab. He presents Philo as saying little (directly) to do with Judaism, despite that Porphyry had endorsed Philo on exactly that. But Eusebius doesn't state this outright. What Eusebius lets us read is that Philo mentioned the genealogy of "Elus" - as Kronos. El is, of course, a common name in the Jewish Torah often identified with their YHWH. Porphyry had mixed opinions on Judaism: he appreciated the laws, mostly, but he disagreed morally with meat-consumption and also with the Christian exegeses of Genesis Two - which went down to the text itself. Porphyry's motive was to present Moses as Israel's oracle to the Platonists' god, poorly transmitted. Philo was by contrast a naturalist out to rebut the Greeks... based on a rebuttal of the Canaanites.

What I don't know, and would like to know, is if the Phoenicians themselves were of a mind philosophical enough to argue that point in their own tongue. I am sure Philo himself represents honestly if as "hostile witness" the Egypt-Canaan synthesis longstanding in Gubla. (A parallel Egypt-Jewish synthesis acted upon the Levites, Egyptian exiles and heretics attached to a Canaanite kingdom.) I wonder if other Canaanites denied this. And I wonder how old the argument was, already.

As for the Jews: I think Philo's take on Jewish YHWH wasn't that YHWH was an historical personage like (he claimed) Elus. I think Philo's take was Ptolemy's take: that Moses invented bad oracles in "Yao"'s name, or maybe in Thoth's. Porphyry wasn't going to admit that; neither was Eusebius.