usually some
philosophical meaning. It enables the interpreter to bring writings of
antiquity into touch with the culture of his or any age; "the gates of
allegory are never closed, and they open upon a path which stretches
without a break through the centuries." In the region of jurisprudence
there is an institution with a similar purpose, which is known as
"legal fiction," whereby old laws by subtle interpretation are made to
serve new conditions and new needs. Allegorical interpretation must be
carefully distinguished from the writing of allegory, of which
Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" is the best-known type. One is the
converse of the other; for in allegories moral ideas are represented
as persons and moral lessons enforced by what purports to be a story
of life. In allegorical interpretation persons are transformed into
ideas and their history into a system of philosophy. The Greek
philosophers had applied this method to Homer since the fourth century
B.C.E., in order to read into the epic poet, whose work they regarded
almost as a Divine revelation, their reflective theories of the
universe. And doubtless the Jewish philosophers were influenced by
their example.

Their allegorical treatment of the Bible was intended, not merely to
adapt it to the Greek world, but to strengthen its hold on the
Alexandrian Jews themselves. These, as they acquired Hellenic culture,
found that the Bible in its literal sense did not altogether satisfy
their conceptions. They detected in it a certain primitiveness, and
having eaten further of the tree of knowledge, they were aware of its
philosophical nakedness. It was full of anthropomorphism, and it
seemed wanting in that which the Greek world admired above all
things--a systematic theology and systematic ethics. The idea that the
words of the Bible contained some hidden meanings goes back to the
earliest Jewish tradition and is one of the bases of the oral law; but
the special characteristic of the Alexandrian exegesis is that it
searched out theories of God and life like those which the Greek
philosophers had developed. The device was necessary to secure the
allegiance of the people to the Torah. And from the need of expounding
the Bible in this way to the Jewish public at Alexandria, there arose
a new form of religious literature, the sermon, and a new form of
commentary, the homiletical. The words "homiletical" and "homily"
suggest what they originally connoted; they are derived