Turns Out the Shulamite’s Belly Is Not the Great Sanhedrin

“The sixteenth century Reformers are rightly given the credit for having recovered this [grammatico-historical] method by rescuing biblical interpretation from the fanciful allegorizations of medieval writers. When they spoke of the ‘literal’ meaning, they were contrasting it with the ‘allegorical’; they were not denying that some passages of Scripture are deliberately poetical in style and figurative in meaning” (Stott, Between Two Worlds, p. 127).