Jonah and The Gourd Vine
The book closes abruptly (Jonah 4) with an epistolary warning based on the emblematic trope of a fast growing vine present in Persian narratives, and popularized in certain collections of Aesop's fables such as The Gourd and the Palm-tree during the Renaissance, for example by Andrea Alciato. St. Jerome differed with St. Augustine in his Latin translation of the plant known in Hebrew as קיקיון (qiyqayown), using Hedera (from the Greek, meaning ivy) over the more common Latin cucurbita from which the related English plant name cucumber is derived. The Renaissance humanist artist Albrecht Dürer memorialized Jerome's courage in electing to use a more perfect analogical type of Christ's am the Vine you are the branches" in his woodcut Saint Jerome in His Study.
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Famous quotes containing the words jonah, gourd and/or vine:
“Why need Christians be still intolerant and superstitious? The simple-minded sailors were unwilling to cast overboard Jonah at his own request.”
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“Are you not the oasis where I dream, and the gourd from which I drink in long draughts the wine of memory?”
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“A melon forced off the vine will not be sweet.”
—Chinese proverb.