Hermeneutics, the study of the general principles of biblical interpretation. For both Jews and Christians through their histories, the primary purpose of hermeneutics, and of the exegetical methods employed in interpretation, has been to discover the truths and value of the bible
The sacred status of the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, rest upon the conviction that it is a receptacle of divine revelation. The understanding of the Bible as the word of God, however, has not generated one uniform hermeneutical principle for its interpretation. Some persons have argued that the interpretation of the Bible must always be literal because the word of God is explicit and complete; others have insisted that the Biblical words must always have a deeper “Spiritual” meaning because God’s message an truth is a self evidently profound still others have maintained that some parts of Bible must be treated literally and some figuratively. In the history of Biblical interpretation, four major types of hermeneutics have emerge: the literal, moral, allegorical and anagogical.
Literal Interpretation: Asserts that a biblical text is to be interpreted according to the “plain meaning” conveye by tis grammatical construction and historical context.The literal meaning is held to correspond to the intention of the authors. This type of hermeneutics is often, but not necessarily associated with belief in the verbal inspiration of the bible, according to which the individual words of divine message were divinely chosen.Extreme forms of this view are criticized on the ground that they do not account adequately for the evident individuality of style and vocabulary found in the various biblical authors.Jerome, an Influential 4th century biblical scholar, championed the literal interpretation of the bible in opposition to what he regard as the excesses of allegorical interpretation. The primary of the literal sense was later advocated by such diverse figures as Thomas Aquinas, Nichales of Lyra, John Colet, Martin Luther, and John Calvin.
Moral Interpretation: it seeks to establish exegetical principle by which ethnical lessons may be drawn from the various parts of the Bible. Allegorization was often employed in this endeavour.The letter of Barnabas (C. 100 CE), for example, interprets the dietary laws prescribed not the book of the Leviticus as forbidding not the flesh of certain animals but rather the vices imaginatively associated with these animals.
Allegorical interpretation: the third type of hermeneutics, interprets the biblical narratives as having a second level of reference beyond those person, things and events explicitly mentioned in the text. A particular form of allegorical interpretation is typological, according to which the key figures, main events, and principal institutions of the Old Testament are seen as “types” or foreshadowing of persons, events, and objects in the New Testament.According to the theory, interpretations such as Noah’s ark as a”type” of Christian church have been intended by God from the beginning.Philo, a Jewish Philosopher and contemporary of Jesus, employed platonic and stoic categories to interprete the Jewish scriptures.
His general practices were adopted by the Christian clement of Alexandria, who sought the allegorical sense of biblical texts. Clemtn discovered deep philosophical truths in the plain-sounding narratives and precepts of the bible. His successor, Origen, Systematized these hermeneutical principles. Origen distinguished the literal, moral and spiritual sense but acknowledged the spiritual (i.e. allegorical) to be the highest.In the middle Ages, Origen’s threefold sense of scripture was expanded into a fourfold sense into the allegorical and the anagogical.
The fourth major type of Biblical hermeneutics is the anagogical, or mystical interpretation. The mode of interpretation seeks to explain biblical events as the relate to or prefigure the life to come. Such an approach to the bible is exemplified by the Jewish kabala, which sought to disclose the mystical significance of the numerical values of Hebrew letters and words.A chief example of such mystical interpretation in Judaism is the medieval Zohar. In Christianity, many of the interpretations associated with Mariology falls into the anagogical category.
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