Allegory, Scandal, and Amalakites

Context: The post originated as a comment during a discussion of a piece by Dr. Jeremiah Carey on the allegorical interpretation of scripture. My remarks were composed in response to an interesting objection raised by Loup des Abeilles ("Wolf of Bees," a fantastic name) to the method used by the Church Fathers in dealing with difficult texts. He writes: 

"My only problem with the allegorizing rescue of Scripture from its own barbarity is that its flesh, its historical meaning, is left aside unexplained and unredeemed. Did the events occur or not? Ultimately this leads us to questions about the nature of revelation. We must at least admit that if God's pedagogy towards Israel was at work throughout that history, Israel committed barbaric acts, and their sages ascribed the motive power of those barbaric acts to God... No amount of allegorizing sleight of hand can get us out of this altogether more concrete problem."

Response: I think if we’re engaging in a historicist interpretation up until the point where we encounter a moral scandal and then suddenly switch into allegory (only to switch back out again when the offending passage has concluded), it is a problem. But—even though the Fathers don’t always put it this way—there’s a sense in which all properly "Scriptural" interpretation is allegorical and non-historicist, and so-called "allegorical" and "spiritual" readings are simply an intense concentration of a more general method. The first Christians genuinely thought all Scripture referred to Christ; it was that underlying conviction (which will always seem ridiculous to the unconvinced, ancient or modern) that drove them towards more explicit allegory in the first place.

And, anyways, it’s not like most of the atrocities of the Old Testament are well-documented historical events that later Israelites were forced to foist off on God because they couldn't escape the truth. The various massacres recounted in the Torah aren’t based on eyewitness testimony—they were already part of a semi-mythical past when they were first written down, centuries after the purported events. There are no bones of the Amalekites or Midianites screaming out for justice; there is no extra-biblical evidence of the death of the Egyptian firstborn. The conquest narratives in particular may have been didactic in intent from their first composition, presenting a legendary past as as an allegory for Israel's need to rigorously uphold the Law during the period of the monarchy (that's pretty close to what Anglican biblical scholar R. W. L. Moberly argues, anyways). So, maybe "herem" was always meant to be a standard we applied to ourselves, and trying to cash it out in historical terms is missing the point, even on a literal and historical level.

I know some people get really uncomfortable when you start suggesting that maybe it doesn't matter whether most of the stuff in the Old Testament "really happened," and that to even ask the question is to get off on the wrong foot. I mean, I remember being in that place. But I think that's one prejudice of modernity that's a non-starter for honest, responsible scriptural interpretation. Like, the implications of what Jesus says in Matthew 19:8 ("because of the hardness of your hearts"), or in the Sermon on the Mount ("you have heard it said... but I say to you...") or what Paul says in 1 Cor. 10:11 ("Now these things happened to them figuratively, and were written for the purpose of our admonition...") and Galatians 3:19 ("[The Law] was ordained through angels by a mediator") are fairly radical, and essentially make a historicist take, where we're primarily interested in 'who did what,' DOA. As soon as we grant that Scripture was accomodated to the hardness of human hearts, and that it was (at a literal level) a diminished and incomplete expression of the fullness of God in Christ, or that it was communicated through fallible intermediaries (and was primary didactic in purpose)... well, what do we have left? I think the best thing a thoughtful Christian can say about the Old Testament is "I don't know what 'really happened,' but I do know that, with Christ as an interpretive key, it is useful for teaching about Him and warning us against the wrong path (2 Timothy 3:16). Some of it is barbaric on a literal level, but the literal level is the wrong place to start anyways." I don't see anything dishonest about that approach.