But so that the resurrection does not seem to be proclaimed only of those bodies that are committed to tombs, you have it written: “And I will command the fishes of the sea, and they will bring up the bones they have eaten, and I will join joint to joint and bone to bone.”⁠a “So,” you say, “the fishes too will be raised, and the other beasts and the flesh-eating birds, so that they may vomit up those they devoured, since in Moses too you read that blood is required from all beasts?” Surely not. But beasts and fishes are named for this reason, with regard to the giving back of flesh and blood, so that the resurrection even of devoured bodies may be the more clearly expressed, when the demand is decreed upon the devourers themselves. And I think Jonah a fit proof of this divine power too, when he is rolled out of the belly of the fish unharmed in both substances, flesh and soul; and surely the stomach of the whale would have sufficed to digest flesh in three days as well as a coffin, a tomb, or the decay of some burial long at rest and closed; granted that the beast also figured men savage above all against the Christian name, or even the very angels of iniquity, from whom blood will be required by a vengeance to be paid out. Who, then, more inclined to learn than to presume, more careful to believe than to dispute, more reverent toward divine wisdom than eager for his own, hearing something appointed by God for flesh and skin and sinews and bones, will interpret these as something else, as though what is proclaimed for these substances were not appointed for man? For either nothing is appointed for man, not the generosity of the kingdom, not the severity of the judgment, not whatever the resurrection is; or, if it is appointed for man, it must be appointed for those substances of which the man is built for whom it is appointed. I ask this too of these most subtle transformers of bones and flesh and sinews and tombs: why, whenever something is said about the soul, do they interpret the soul as nothing else and do not transform it into a figure of some other thing, but when something is declared about some bodily kind, they assert that it is anything rather than what is named? If bodily things are parables, so are things of the soul; if things of the soul are not, neither are bodily things. For man is body as much as soul, so that one kind cannot admit riddles while the other excludes them.