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A little-known monk living in the Egyptian desert at the end of the fourth century provided one of the most durable interpretive keys in the history of Bible study. The monk, named Nesteros proposed that all of Holy Scripture is to be understood in four ways or senses. He explained this paradigm by examining the various meanings of "Jerusalem" in the Bible. According to Nesteros, Jerusalem is an image of the redeemed but struggling Christian soul. Nesteros's "four senses" became the foundation of all monastic reading of the Bible. Although it was the monks and other ascetics who left us the greatest body of literature on this subject, there is nothing intrinsically "monastic" about this approach to Scripture.