Describes how some ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian interpreters used allegory to endorse, revise, and subvert competing Christian and pagan world views. The author insists that ancient allegory is best understood not simply as a way of reading texts, but as a way of using non-literal readings to reinterpret culture and society.

The study engages issues in the fields of classics, history of Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism, literary criticism and theory, and more broadly, critical theory and cultural criticism.