ABSTRACT
Hellenistic Judaism was largely able to use these allegorical hermeneutics in order to transport the world of the Old Testament into the educated circles of Greek culture. In this manner, the traditions in the Old Testament could be presented as deep philosophical truths to general society as well as to Jews, who were moving away from their heritage. Much of the history of hermeneutics can be understood as the development of the basic opposition between Plato and Aristotle, between speculative striving for the otherworldly and sober analysis of this world itself, between poetic conversation and cool, formal logic. German idealism primarily dealt with the search for an inner logic and meaning of history as such. The philosophy of Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel proposed an optimistic theory of a dialectically structured historical development that itself was oriented towards a goal. ‘The interpretation of biblical literature is governed by the same conditions of understanding as interpretation of any other type of literature.
