 On the fifth day, God creates the living beings according to a scala naturae replete with Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic echoes. As has been remarked, there is a crucial difference between Plato and Philo on this point (Runia 2001: 213). While “the creational sequence” is descending in the former, in the Alexandrian exegetes—who aim to defend the Biblical account—it ascends. Between the fishes, which are the first created, and man, crown of Creation, are birds and land animals. The creation of man, on the sixth day, is for Philo an occasion to develop some of his main themes: the resemblance of the human being to God, based on the Platonic and Stoic idea that the intellect holds the same position in the human being that the Great Creator holds in the cosmos; the concept of the powers of God, introduced with his exegesis of the words, “let us make a human being after our image and likeness”. In fact, argues Philo, God needed no one to create the human being, but preferred that human sins not be attributed to Him. In addition, he cites the Platonic idea of contemplation leading to philosophy, a risky idea since it could lead to such a fascination with worldly things that the Creator would be forgotten and denied, as was the case with the Chaldeans. After a long arithmologic meditation on the hebdomad, the seventh day or Shabbat, Philo arrives at original sin. It is said that the first man (the name Adam is never evoked) was most excellent in his body as well as his soul. He lived in perfect harmony with nature, homeless, but the cosmos was his home and city, where he resided with complete safety. God ascribed to the first man the imposition of names, a philosophical theme with strong Platonic connotations. In the following paragraphs Philo explains his descent into wickedness by the creation of woman. The sentence “woman becomes for him the starting point of a blameworthy life” has aroused many criticisms of misogyny on Philo’s part. It would be absurd to deny that there are many offensive assertions regarding women in his work. Woman is the symbol of sensation, man that of reason. These problems are essential in that they deal with sexuality, ethics and ontology alike. Without trying to defend Philo systematically, one must however emphasize the first sentence of Opif. 151: 