Biblical Hermeneutics
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PRINCIPLES OF BIBLICAL HERMENETICS ; M. M. NINAN<br />
Allegorical interpretation is a tradition handed over through historical development of Judaism<br />
into Christianity. A summary of this is givn in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia from which I<br />
quote in some detail.<br />
1906 edition<br />
....... Two modes of Allegorical Interpretation are found dealing with the Bible: the one,<br />
symbolic or typologic interpretation, derived mainly from Palestinian Jews; the other the<br />
philosophical or mystical modes, originating with the Alexandrian Jews of Egypt. .....<br />
Early Allegorism.<br />
Accordingly, one of the first of the prophets whose writings are preserved, Hosea (xii. 5), is<br />
one of the earliest allegorists, when he says of Jacob's struggle with the angel that it was a<br />
struggle in prayer: this was because the idea of an actual physical contest no longer<br />
harmonized with the prophetic conception of heavenly beings.<br />
The activity of the Scribes at a later period made the Bible a book for scholars, and allegorism<br />
was fostered as a form of Midrash. The Book of Daniel supplied an illustration hereof, when it<br />
interpreted Jeremiah's prophecy of the seventy years of exile (xxix. 10) as seventy weeks of<br />
years, and thus gave hopes of redemption from the contemporary tyranny of the Greeks. The<br />
dread of reproducing <strong>Biblical</strong> anthropomorphisms—a thoroughly Jewish dread, and a<br />
characteristic feature of the oldest portions of the Septuagint—shows the original disposition<br />
of all allegorism; namely, to spiritualize mythology.<br />
Alexandrian Allegorism.<br />
Essential as allegorism thus was to the Palestinian Jews, it was none the less so to the<br />
Alexandrian Hebrews, who were made to feel the derision of the Hellenes at the naive<br />
presentations of the Bible. The Jews replied by adopting the Hellenes' own weapons: if the<br />
latter made Homer speak the language of Pythagoras, Plato, Anaxagoras, and Zeno, the Jews<br />
transformed the Bible into a manual of philosophy which also was made to contain the<br />
teachings of these philosophers. This polemic or apologetic feature of Alexandrian allegorism<br />
is at the same time characteristic of its relation to the Palestinian Midrash on the one hand,<br />
and the allegorized mythology of the Greeks on the other; in its purpose, Alexandrian<br />
allegory was Hellenic; in its origin and method, it was Jewish. But one would hardly be<br />
warranted in maintaining that allegorism was specifically Hellenic because the Alexandrians<br />
were the first Jews known to have cultivated it; nothing can be really proved from the<br />
absence of allegory in the few inconsiderable remains of Palestinian Scriptural lore of the two<br />
centuries before the common era.<br />
The Wisdom of Solomon.<br />
Closely connecting with the Palestinian Midrash is Aristobulus, rightly to be termed the father<br />
of Alexandrian allegory. His purpose, to prove the essential identity of Scripture and<br />
Aristotelianism, is of course the Alexandrian one; but his explanations of the <strong>Biblical</strong><br />
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