poetry).[1]
If ‛Alûka is hell, then fancy has the widest room for finding an answer to the question, What are the two daughters? The Talmud supposes that רשׁות (the worldly domination) and מינות (heresy) are meant. The Church-fathers also, understanding by ‛Alûka the power of the devil, expatiated in such interpretations. Of the same character are Calmet's interpretation, that sanguisuga is a figure of the mala cupiditas, and its twin-daughters are avaritia and ambitio. The truth lying in all these is this, that here there must be some kind of symbol. But if the poet meant, by the two daughters of the ‛Alûka, two beings or things which he does not name, then he kept the best of his symbol to himself. And could he use ‛Alûka, this common name for the leech, without further intimation, in any kind of symbolical sense? The most of modern interpreters do nothing to promote the understanding of the word, for they suppose that ‛Alûka, from its nearest signification, denotes a demoniacal spirit of the character of a vampire, like the Dakinî of the Indians, which nourish themselves on human flesh; the ghouls of the Arabs and Persians, which inhabit graveyards, and kill and eat men, particularly wanderers in the desert; in regard to which it is to be remarked, that (Arab.) ‛awlaḳ is indeed a name for a demon, and that al‛aluwaḳ, according to the Kamus, is used in the sense of alghwal. Thus Dathe, Döderlein, Ziegler, Umbreit; thus also Hitzig, Ewald, and others. Mühlau, while he concurs in this understanding of the word, and now throwing open the question, Which, then, are the two daughters of the demoness ‛Alûka? finds no answer to it in the proverb itself, and therefore accepts of the view of Ewald, since 15b-16, taken by themselves, form a fully completed whole, that the line 'לעלוקה וגו is the beginning of a numerical proverb, the end of which is wanting. We acknowledge, because of the obscurity - not possibly aimed at by the author himself - in which the two daughters remain, the fragmentary characters of the proverb of the ‛Alûka; Stuart also does this, for he regards it as brought out of a connection in which it was intelligible - but we believe that the line 'שׁלושׁ וגו
- ↑ So says e.g., Salomo ha-Babli, in a Zulath of the first Chanukka-Sabbats (beginning אין צוּר חלף): יקדוּ כּהבהבי עלק, they burn like the flames of hell.
