Biblical Hermeneutics

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