Figure of speech. After finishing his tale of the two old women on Nelson's pillar, Stephen is asked for a title and offers two: "I call it A Pisgah Sight of Palestine or The Parable of The Plums." Calling something a parable will make most people think of the homely stories that Jesus tells in the gospels, which appear to have derived from Hebrew traditions. But the term originated in Greek rhetorical theory as parabola, a brief story that illustrates some particular point, usually a moral one. In this case readers are obviously invited to speculate about what the moral of Stephen's story may be.

Parabola (puh-RAB-uh-luh, from Greek para- = beside + ballein = to throw) suggests "throwing together" two unlike things, specifically an idea and a simple story that illustrates it. Since parables have a didactic purpose, they have much in common with fables, the difference being that parables depict realistic human experiences. They also are close kin to metaphor and simile and to the narrative form that extended metaphors can take: allegory. Roman rhetoricians, often using synonyms like similitude, comparison, or exemplum, emphasized this metaphorical element. The Rhetorica ad Herennium says that "Comparison is a manner of speech that carries over an element of likeness from one thing to a different thing. This is used to embellish or prove or clarify or vivify."

Jesus tells parables to make a single instructive point, not as allegorical narratives from which many different meanings could be drawn. Rhetorical theorists advance the same view. In The Elements of Rhetoric (1882), Canadian professor James De Mille writes that "The parable may be defined as a fictitious example designed to inculcate moral or religious truth. It is similar to the allegory; and indeed it often happens that it is difficult to assign some pieces with certainty to the one or the other. There is, however, an essential difference between them. The allegory sets forth a story which shall impart moral instruction of a general character; the parable is a story told for the sake of illustrating some special point. The former is many-sided, the latter is single in its aim; in the one the moral follows from the narrative, in the other the narrative is made up expressly for the sake of the moral; in the allegory the story itself is full of interest, in the parable the moral quite overshadows the story."

If Stephen's Parable of the Plums is indeed an exemplum (with emphasis on the plum!), what instructive point does he expect his listeners to take from it? Parables typically do not explain their meaning, and Jesus's often feel inscrutable. In Mark's gospel he implies that the obscurity is deliberate, telling his disciples that "Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: / That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them" (4:11-12). Some such stories, Jesus suggests, are intended to baffle understanding, and Stephen's parable surely leaves many readers feeling as baffled as the schoolboys in Nestor feel after hearing his riddle. As he prepares to tell that riddle, Stephen thinks of one of Jesus's sayings: "To Caesar what is Caesar's, to God what is God's. A long look from dark eyes, a riddling sentence to be woven and woven on the church's looms." Jesus was a riddler, then, and so is Stephen.

The riddle is brief: two spinsters behave in a very suggestive manner while gazing on the statue of a British military hero. One might draw the depressing conclusion that the women feel frisky in the presence of a foreign conqueror because Irish people embrace their colonial subjection. But exactly the opposite inference might also be drawn: by lifting up their skirts and exposing themselves the women enact a symbolic defiance of England and place a curse on its military rule. If this reading is correct it explains why the parable is linked with Moses's Pisgah sight of Palestine. Both titles imply the liberation of Ireland from British rule.

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