It has drawn an audience for many reasons, including its dedication to the topic of the creation period, its novel monotheistic reading of the Timaeus by Plato (subsequently adopted by the Church Fathers and in Christian Platonism), and its development of Logos theology.
Philo was working within an existing Jewish tradition of commentary and exegesis of the books of Moses, such as the earlier (and now lost) writings of Aristobulus of Alexandria.
[5] Baudouin Decharneux has argued that Philo's doctrine of divine powers (δυναμεις) was influenced equally by biblical and Greek (primarily Platonic) ideas.
[7] In subsequent writings, Philo calls the Opificio a συνταζξις, or an "ordered composition", a didactic or systematic prose work.
[8] According to Runia, the structure of Philo's Opificio can be divided into twenty-five chapters as follows (with the symbol §§ denoting the term "sections"):[9]