 One major intellectual revolution in the passage from the Hellenistic period to Middle Platonism was a relative abandoning of the concept of oikeiôsis (natural kinship) which, originating with the Stoics, became a foundation of ethics not only in Stoicism but also in Epicureanism and the late Aristotelianism of Antiochus of Ascalon. The Hellenistic period was that of a naturalism that only the sceptic Academy undertook to fight it. The great change brought by Middle Platonism was the irruption of transcendence which seemed to have been forgotten for at least two centuries. And in the case of Philo, transcendence was not only philosophical, but also religious, mainly that of the God of the Bible. Philo sometimes uses the term oikeiôsis, but never in the Stoic meaning, always with semantic transformations. He could not accept the idea, central in the dogma of oikeiôsis, that children as well as animals are the image of nature. His own description of the world of childhood is a frightening one, a description Sigmund Freud would not have spurned. For him the main ethical purpose is to become closer and closer to God, and so to be in a spiritual kinship with Him. At this point, Philonian oikeiôsis is not different from the Platonic omoiôsis. It is not, as in Stoicism, an initial impulse, indicating the path of nature, but the result of a pious asceticism, getting rid of desire and passionate impulses. It has been suggested that the resemblance to God did not have in Philo any concrete social or ethical consequences, but things are much more complex. He says in Decalogo 133 that murder is forbidden because of the common resemblance (omoiôsis) of all men to God, but it is true that he does not develop extensively the consequences of this omoiôsis. In Stoicism, there is a kind of family relationship between human beings, since they alone (among animals) share reason in a world which is itself exclusively rational. Philo puts great weight on the specific status of Israel as the only people able to see God, an etymology of which he is very fond. In Alexandria, anti-Semitic propagandists accused Jews of being a group unified through their hatred of other nations, and today in the scholarship, the problem of universalism in Philo is much discussed (Berthelot 2003). However, it is necessary to distinguish between the ontological level and the ethical level. Because of its specific relation with God, Israel is the priest of the Nations, for whom it prays and offers sacrifices (Abr. 98; Somn. 2.163; Mos. 2.133–135). At the same time, Philo never denied that non-Jews could reach wisdom. For him, as well as Jews, Greeks and Barbarians could be ascetics of wisdom. Jewish superiority lies in the unique capacity to articulate the three levels: human individual perfection, with the examples of the patriarchs and Moses; social perfection, that of a society ruled by the laws of Moses; and ontological specificity, due to a deep kinship with God.