Teaching Christianity
a knowledge of languages, partly by a knowledge of things. Take the pool of Siloam, for instance, where the Lord told the man to wash his face, after he had anointed his eyes with mud made from spittle; it certainly has some force as a comparison and undoubtedly suggests some hidden meaning; but unless the evangelist had translated that name of an unknown language, the understanding of such an important truth would have escaped us.[52] So also there can be no doubt that many Hebrew names, which were not translated by the authors of these books, will be of no little value and help in solving the riddles of the scriptures, if you can translate them. And several men, learned in that language, have conferred what is indeed no small benefit on posterity by collecting all such words from the scriptures and translating them, and telling us what Adam means, or Eve, or Abraham, or Moses; or with place names too, what Jerusalem means, or Zion, or Jericho, or Sinai, or Lebanon, or Jordan, or any other names in that language whose meaning is unknown to us. When these have been translated and made plain, the meaning of many figurative expressions in the scriptures is revealed.
24. Ignorance of things, on the other hand, makes figurative expressions obscure, when we are ignorant of the natures of animals, or stones, or herbs, or other things which are frequently mentioned in scripture by way of similes and comparisons. Take what is known about serpents, for instance, that in order to protect their heads they present their whole bodies to those who are striking them; what a light it throws on the meaning of the Lord's bidding us to be as cunning as serpents,[53] namely that for the sake of our head, which is Christ, we should rather offer our bodies to the persecutors, lest our Christian faith should as it were be slain in us, if to spare our bodies we were to deny God! Or there's the way in which a snake is said to squeeze through a narrow cranny in a cave, in order to lay aside its old skin and so take