era.  We have to imagine a state of culture in which it was only the Book of books to one small nation, while to others it was at best a curious record of ancient times, just as the Code of Hammurabi or the Egyptian Book of Life is to us.  The Alexandrian Jews were the first to popularize its teachings, to bring Jewish religion into line with the thought of the Greek world.  It was to this end that they founded a particular form of Midrash—­the allegorical interpretation, which is largely a distinctive product of the Alexandrian age.  The Palestinian rabbis of the time were on the one hand developing by dialectic discussion the oral tradition into a vast system of religious ritual and legal jurisprudence; on the other, weaving around the law, by way of adornment to it, a variegated fabric of philosophy, fable, allegory, and legend.  Simultaneously the Alexandrian preachers—­they were never quite the same as the rabbis—­were emphasizing for the outer world as well as their own people the spiritual side of the religion, elaborating a theology that should satisfy the reason, and seeking to establish the harmony of Greek philosophy with Jewish monotheism and the Mosaic legislation.  Allegorical interpretation is “based upon the supposition or fiction that the author who is interpreted intended something ‘other’ [Greek:  allo] than what is expressed”; it is the method used to read thought into a text which its words do not literally bear, by attaching to each phrase some deeper, 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.