[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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