Look who's still showing up in syncs

Did you know who it would be before you clicked?

I spotted this today, from a vocabulary list in an English magazine used by one of my adult students:

Joan juxtaposed with dark (d'Arc), as an example of how to use the word typical. I know typical is just about the last adjective anyone would think of applying to the Maid of Orléans, but the timing made it singularly appropriate.

Just last night, you see, I had been thinking about Jonah, though I'm not sure how that particular prophet happened to come to mind. (I have been listening to the Bible read aloud but had only got as far as Nehemiah last night.)

I thought of Jesus' statement, "A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas" (Matt. 12:39, 16:4; Luke 11:29) -- and I thought that, since Jonah is simply the Hebrew word for "dove," this could have a double meaning: "no sign but the sign of the dove."

Joseph Smith taught, "The sign of the dove was instituted before the creation of the world, a witness for the Holy Ghost, and the devil cannot come in the sign of a dove." In my recent post "Who or what is the ultimate spiritual authority? (a Mormon perspective)," I had discussed various litmus tests proposed by Smith for distinguishing heavenly messengers from demonic impostors, but had neglected to mention this one.

I thought of how the sign of the dove is supposed to have appeared both at Christ's baptism with water and at Joan's baptism with fire -- and then I remembered that it was a pun on the name Jonah that had first brought Joan to my attention.

I have recently been reading Scott Alexander's novel Unsong. One of the running gags is "biblical pun correction." One of the characters mentions Joan of Arc and is "corrected" by another: "Jonah whale; Noah ark." Later in the conversation, someone says "to no avail" and receives the converse correction: "Noah ark; Jonah whale."

As I dwelt on Jonah, I thought of the strange story with which that book ends, where a "gourd" (KJV) is eaten by a worm, making Jonah so upset that he wants to die. Gourds tie in with the cucurbit syncs from earlier this year, but I was vaguely aware that Jonah's plant was not necessarily a gourd, and that there had been some controversy among the early Fathers of the Church as to precisely what plant it was and how it should be translated. My curiosity about this led me to the Wikipedia entry on Jonah. In the second paragraph of that article, it reads,

Jesus calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah", which is his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as a type for Jesus.

The word type was a link to the Wikipedia entry "Typology (theology)," and even though I know perfectly well what a "type" is and was not interested in reading a Wikipedia article on the subject, I succumbed to a sudden whim and clicked it. The "Typology" article opened in a new tab, which I them immediately closed without reading any of it. (Looking at the article again now, I see that it highlights Jonah in particular, with a section called "Example of Jonah" followed by one called "Other Old Testament examples.")

Thus it was that, when I saw Joan (dark) described as "a typical girl," I was primed to think of a different -- an atypical, I suppose! -- meaning of that word.

If Joan of Arc was a "typical girl" -- a type, in the theological sense -- that would mean that some "new Joan" will arise -- some figure whom Joan would appear, in retrospect, to foreshadow. I had previously neglected this possibility, since I know, from my own direct experience and that of others whom I trust, that Joan herself has literally come back in person and appeared to people in recent years. Those two ways of "coming back" are not necessarily mutually exclusive, though. The Gospels present Elijah and Moses as types of John and Jesus, respectively -- but the two ancient prophets also appear in person at the Transfiguration.