Greetings Doves,

     Many, throughout the ages and into present times, some "scholars" have insisted upon an allegorical interpretation of scripture. That concept is VERY problematic.

     The history of allegory. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC, there arose philosophical groups in Greeks know as the 'Stoics' and 'Cynics". In their first appearance they used cynicism in a polemic against Greek Mythology. In essence they proposed: The Greek writers have told of giants, Neptune, Apollo, Herculese, etc (Some "Roman gods" maybe in there, but unintended). They said no one should take the reports seriously as they demanded "Show us the bones of these giant creatures"! The bones  could not be produced, thus those who were backers of the stories had to "back down" and the stories were descended into myth.

     The same demands of logic eventually came to be  applied to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, and different interpretations were forced. It is quite possible that hasatan foresaw this and as the giants died, their bodies dragged off into the deepest part of the sea. However"giantism" is real, as evidenced by the dinosaurs, so there is sufficient grounds to suspect hasatan manipulated the human genome to produce giants, of which Goliath was a "latter type" example.

     But giantism is itself not the problem, it is rather the allegorical hermeneutic it created; whereby scripture is not granted a literal "starting point". The problem here is that we humans have a hard enough time figuring out the "who, what, how, why, where and when" of LITERAL interpretation, much less than a "symbolic" fulfillment of prophecy.

     This has implications today especially in the Book of Ezekiel (CH's 37-48), Zech (Ch's 11- End), Daniel and the Book of Rev. Insistence on the allegorical fulfillment of these chapters inevitably leads to mass confusion.

     It seems clear that the writes of scripture were largely literal in their intent, with only some items obviously meant to be figurative.

     Anyway that is how 'allegorical interpretation' found its way into the Christian hermineutic.