iii. Allegorical Interpretation. — The ten- dency to allegorize has its foundations in human nature. Constantly and unconsciously we read into the creations of other men, as, for example, into a painting or a poem, our own thoughts, con- ceptions, and emotions, and are scarcely to be persuaded that they were not the original thoughts, conceptions, and emotions of the creator. Or,
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again, when any literature lia» so deeply inwrought iteelf into the hearts and lives of a people as to have become a sacred and inseparable constituent of their nature, and when time has nevertheless so far chanj^ed the current of thouj.'ht as to make that literature apparently inconsistent with the new idea, or inadequate to express it, — then the choice for the people lies between a ruinous breach with what is, by this time, part and parcel of themselves, and, on the other hand, forcing the olil lan^'uage to be a vehicle for the new thought. Hence the tendency to allegory, which is indigenous to human nature, becomes, in the absence of his- torical criticism, also innntahle, except to the indifferent iconoclast, if such there be. Allegory proved the safety-valve for Greek, Jew, and Christian. During and, perhaps, owing to tlie in- tellectual movement of the hfth century B.C., — in 6pit« of the severe critical <ieprecation of Plato, whose mind was set on higher things, — Homer, the ' IJilile of the Greeks,' was saved for the educate<i by allegory ; with the stories he told of the gods, if he was not allegorical, he was impious, or they were immoral. Hence, from Anaxagoras onwards, the actions of the Homeric gods and heroes are allegories of the forces of nature ; and, in Heraclitus (iirst century A.D. ), the ' story of Ares and Aphrodite and Hepha'stus is a picture of iron sulxlued by tire, and restored to its original hard- ness by Poseidon, that is, by water.' Or else they are the movements of mental powers and moral virtues ; and so, in Comutus (also first cent. A.D.), when Odysseus filled his ears that he might be deaf to the song of the Sirens, it is an allegory of the righteous filling their senses and powers of mind with di\'ine words and actions that the passions and pleasures which tempt all men on the sea of life might knock at their doors in vain (Hatch, llibhert Lecture,i, 1888, pp. 62, 64).
Hut allegorizing was Jewish as well as (ireek, and Palestinian as well as Hellenistic. Hoth sections of Jews used allegory for apologetic purpcses, but not with identical aims. The Pal. Jews allegorized the OT, finding a hidden sense in sentences, words, letters, and (in the centuries after Christ) even vowel-points, in order to satisfy their consciences for the non-observance of laws that had become impracticalile, or to justify traditional and often trivial increment, or to defend God against apparent inconsistency, or the writers or historical ctiaracters against impiety or immorality ; or, generally, for homiletical pur- poses. Thus Akiba (first and second centuries a.k.) claimed to have saved by allegory the Sonif of Songs from rejection. Allegory was a consider- able element in the Pal. Haggada (or inter- vretation), and there were definite canons regu- lating its use. The Hellenistic Jews, whose metropolis of culture was Alexandria, and who, in the neighbourhoo<l of NT times, constituted the majority of Jews, directed their apologetic towards educated Greeks, for philosophical pur- poses, and allegorized the OT to jirove that their sacred Inioks were neither barbarous nor immoral nor iiiMiious, that their religion had the same rationale as Greek philosophy, and that Moses had l)een the teacher, or, at all events, the anticipator, of Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. The Helknistic thinkers desired to be Greek philo- sophers without ceasing to l>e Jewish religionists. Thus the Alexandrian Aristobulus (second cent. B.C.), reputed to be the earliest known Hellenistic allegorizer, in his coiniiientary on the Pent, ad- dressed to Ptolemy Philoinclor, sought (as Clement of Alexandria says) to ' bring Peripatetic philo- sophy out of Moses an<l the Prophet.s.' l!ut the representative Alexandrian allegorizer was Pliilo (early in first century A.Ii.) : he reduced allegory to VOL. I. — s
a system of his own, with canons similar to those of the Pal. Haggadists, but freely used, and adapted to philosophical ends by means of the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Professing to retain the literal sense as carrjnng in itself moral teach ing, he nevertheless made the allegorical so tran- scendentlj' significant (as the soul in the body) that both literal and moral were continually over- whelmed : before the writer's deteiiuination to extract the allegorical at all costs and in any sense that at the time suited his mood, the facts often disappeared, the narrative was turned upside dowii, and, in the handling of the characters of OT story, the unities were entirely ignored. So, when it is said that Jacob took a stone for his pillow, what he did, as the archetype of a self-disciplining soul, was to put one of the incorporeal intelligences of that holy ground close to his mind ; and, under the pretext of going to sleep, he, in reality, found repose in the intelligence which he had chosen that on it he might lay the burden of his life. A";ain, Joseph is made, in one aspect, the type ot the sensual mind, and, in another, of a conqueror \-ictorious over pleasure.