He does not depend on such
devices, for he wanders into allegory more often than not without any
pretext of the kind.
The modern reader may consider the allegorical method artificial and
unconvincing, even if he does not go so far as Spinoza, and say that
it is "useless, harmful, and absurd."[125] We prefer to-day to show
the inner agreement of philosophical with Biblical teaching, rather
than pretend that all philosophy is contained within the Bible; and we
accept the Bible as it stands, as a book of supreme religious worth,
without requiring more of it. But that is mainly a difference of taste
or of method, and in Philo's day, and in fact down to the time of the
sixteenth-century Renaissance, Jew and Gentile alike preferred the
other way. For thought, ancient and mediaeval, was pervaded with the
craving for authority or a plausible show of it. The Bible was not
only the great book of morality, but the standard of truth, that from
which knowledge in all its branches started, and that by which it was
to be judged. As all knowledge came from God, so all knowledge was in
God's Book; and allegory was the method by which the intellectual
conceptions of succeeding ages were attached to it.
The two main heads of Biblical interpretation which the Jewish
religious genius developed, Peshat and Derash,--these represent two
permanent attitudes of mind.
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