The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah Vol 1 - Predestination

other, accommodation to those who were weak?
Here, then, was the principle of a twofold
interpretation of the Word of God—the literal and
the allegorical. The letter of the text must be held
fast; and Biblical personages and histories were
real. But only narrow-minded slaves of the letter
would stop here; the more so, as sometimes the
literal meaning alone would be tame, even absurd;
while the allegorical interpretation gave the true
sense, even though it might occasionally run
counter to the letter. Thus, the patriarchs
represented states of the soul ] and, whatever the
letter might bear, Joseph represented one given to
the fleshly, whom his brothers rightly hated;
Simeon the soul aiming after the higher; the killing
of the Egyptian by Moses, the subjugation of
passion, and so on. But this allegorical
interpretation—by the side of the literal (the
Peshat of the Palestinians)—though only for the
few, was not arbitrary. It had its * laws,' and *
canons'—some of which excluded the literal
interpretation, while others admitted it by the side
of the higher meaning.^