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Hermeneutics may be described as the theory of interpretation and understanding of a text through empirical means. Empiricism is the philosophical doctrine that all human knowledge ultimately comes from the senses and from experience. Empiricism denies that humans have innate ideas or that anything is knowable a priori, i.e., without reference to experience.

Empiricism is contrasted with continental rationalism, which is based on the thesis that human reason can in principle be the source of all knowledge. Rationalists typically argue that, starting with intuitively-understood basic principles, like the axioms of geometry, one could deductively derive the rest of knowledge. Empricists believe that only knowledge of eternal truths - including the truths of mathematics, and the epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the sciences - could be attained by reason alone; other knowledge required experience of the world, aided by the scientific method.

Your assertion is that systemic rational or empirical methodologies for interpretation of Scripture are be rejected out of hand because

different parts of scripture, even different sections within the same book, were written in different time periods for people living in completely different cultural and historical circumstances

and ONLY allegorical method is acceptable is ludicrous. It is for the very reasons you cite that hermeneutics were developed. All communication of any sort must be interpreted. Words are limited and various interpretation can be developed. You seem to be objecting that through the use of hermeneutics the Bible can be made to say anything one wants but the allegorical method is the only way to arrive at the truth. The bottom line is that the Bible presents truth in a fragmented way, and therefor a systemic approach is absolutely required to interpret it, not some fragmented allegorical interpretive method. I can make the phone book say what ever I want if I veiw it as allegory.

And neither does tradition have any bearing on what the Bible says. When we approach an octogon shaped sign in an automobile, we don't stop because we traditionally stop there, we stop because it says STOP on the sign (and its against the law not to). You can view the octogon shaped sign metaphorically as a triangle shaped sign, but you do so at your own risk (and if you clobber or get clobbered by somebody, no matter how insistent you are on your allegory, your interpretation was flawed in that regard).

Your assertion is that systemic rational or empirical methodologies for interpretation of Scripture are be rejected out of hand...and ONLY allegorical method is acceptable is ludicrous.

I never asserted that. Obviously some things are allegorical and some are literal. I only asserted that you can't use the same rules to interpret all of scripture.

Let me more more specific. The rules for determining whether something in the Torah is allegorical or symbolic are very different from whether something in the Gospels is literal or symbolic. That's because the culture that produced the Torah, i.e. late monarchical and exiled Israel, was vastly different than that of the Gospels.

You, of course, seem to think that the rules should be unifom for both, and that's patently absurd on its face.