504 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY. 



renness was a source of keenest grief to her,* which furnishes a motive 

 for her request. Furthermore, the whole chapter in which the dudd'im 

 are introduced, up to the twenty-fifth verse, bears upon the sterility of 

 Rachel and the fecundity of Leah, and nothing else. This interpretation 

 is further strengthened by Leah's reluctance to give up the dudaim ; for 

 her power over Jacob depended upon the fact that her rival bore him no 

 children. 



There seems, then, sufficient reason for supposing that Rachel wanted 

 the duda'im for the purpose of relieving her sterility.f Whether or not 

 dudaim and maudragora are identical is another question, — one which 

 has never been certainly answered, and which probably never will be, 

 inasmuch as there were doubtless other plants which were thought to 

 favor conception, and, as far as the passage in Genesis is concerned, the 

 duda'im may have been any one of these as well as mandragora. But 

 in any case it seems certain that a word meaning love-apples would not 

 have been so rendered by the Seventy if mandragora had not been well 

 known as an aphrodisiac at the time the translation was made, t 



The fullest and best description of the mandragora is found in 

 Dioscorides. § Pliny gives a somewhat shorter one. || Theophrastus H 

 does not attempt a connected description of the plant known to him by 

 this name, but gives a few of its characteristics, thereby showing cer- 

 tainly that it was neither the mandragora of Dioscorides and Pliny nor 

 the plant known as mandragora in Greece and Italy in later times. 



We learn from Dioscorides that the mandragora had a variety of 

 names; he himself mentions four, and the interpolator gives several 

 more. A number of these were also applied to other plants, with 



went fartlier and attempted to show on physiological grounds liow the mandragora 

 may have favored conception. See, for example, the opinions cited by Earth. 

 Angl., De Propr. Rerum, lib. 17, cap. 104. 



* Gen. 80. 1. 



t Frederick Starr, Amer. Antiq., 23 (1001), p. 267, says that the .Tews still 

 believe in the power of mandragora to induce fertility, and that American Jews 

 today import specimens of the root from tiie Orient for this purpose. 



f Mention should be made in passing of a reference of somewhat uncertain 

 significance in tlie pseudo-Orphic Argonautica (1)17-922), where mandragora and 

 fifteen other plants are represented as surrounding the tree on which the golden 

 fleece is suspended. Most of these others as well as the mandragora were asso- 

 ciated with superstitions of one sort or anotiier in antiquity, and they seem to 

 figure here simply as magic plants likely to harm the intruder. 



§ Diosc, 1. 57011. II riin., 25. 147-150. 1| Theophr., 6. 2. 0. 



