Wednesday, December 5, 2012

The Dove Factor in the Jonah and Jason Stories

 



[The AMAIC would give the priority to Jonah, instead]

 

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Doves

The second element in the comparison of the two stories concerns the name of Jonah alone. Yônah in Hebrew means “dove,” one of the birds used in very ancient sailing practice to guide lost sailors to land, as we see both in the story of Noah and the saga of Jason and the Argonauts.**13** When the Argonauts arrive at the Clashing Rocks (the Symplegades) and are unable to find a way out, Phineus, a king-prophet hunted by the Harpies (perhaps because he has betrayed divine secrets), advises the heroes to release a dove to see if it will go through (The story uses an old theme which appears already in a different form in the Odyssey: the flock of doves bringing ambrosia to Zeus must also go through the Planctae but invariably one dove is lost). The Argo eventually follows the dove; bird and ship find a passage through the rocks, but not without leaving a few vestiges behind them —one, its feathers and the other, pieces of rigging. In other variants of the story, doves also play an important role; in Virgil's Aeneid, for instance, two doves lead Aeneas and the Sybil to the Golden Fleece hanging in a tree.**14** In other texts, the prophecies uttered by an oracular oak are reported by doves.**15
 
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