two sides of this process. This concern for the whole process as it involves author, text, and reader, as an act or event of communication, distinguishes hermeneutics from exegesis in one of several different ways. Writers sometimes complain that the Jewish writer Philo, and later the Alexandrian Fathers of the Church from Clement and Origen onward, “allegorize” the text of the biblical writers, or go beyond the so-called literal meaning to an allegorical one. Those who complain insist that this