5) The regulation against weaving two different kinds of material in the same clothe was simply to serve as a lesson for the righteous not to intertwine themselves with non-believers (e.g. do not be unequally yoked…do not plant to different kinds of seeds in the same field…you must differentiate the clean from the unclean, etc, etc, etc…)
So some passages of the Bible - which look a hell of a lot like strict orders - are simply metaphors
Ah yes, in my Bible as literature book that I am reading, allegory and metaphors were Greek concepts, and when the Hebrew Bible was translated from Hebrew into Greek in Alexandria by the Hellenized Jews there, they took the opportunity to edit the Old Testament yet again, dumping a bunch of that stuff into it, I guess because taking it all literally as actually having literally happened, was just too way out there. I have not got that far yet, but I assume when the assorted and sundry Christians wrote what made the cut into the New Testament, they did the same thing - they were Hellenized too.
Allegory and metaphors existed in Hebrew literature, and were understood as such. The Greeks just introduced the literary theory behind them and took the interpretation to a whole new level. I don't know of the OT being edited to include allegory and metaphor - the only Hellenized portions of the OT were some of the wisdom books of the Apocrypha that were influenced by Stoicism. They use a lot of metaphor but no more than the Hebrew wisdom literature did. Philo of Alexandria more than anyone was responsible for a highly allegorical method of interpretation in his commentaries. Paul seems to have used it a little, and the early church fathers such as Origen used it a lot.
