After my questioning about the mandrake in class, I decided to do a little more research...
I know wikipedia doesn't really count as a reliable source...but this page seemed to offer a pretty good summary...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandrake_(plant)
I suppose I can imagine the somewhat human resemblance, maybe not with the picture used on the page. Anyway, I am kind of surprised I never ran across the connections before - mandrakes have been depicted a lot in literature and such. I must say, I do think they are best used when waking up those poor petrified people in Harry Potter :)
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The mandrakes seem to always take on a magical connotation but according to wikipedia not in the Bible of course. If the list of where Mandrakes were used in literature is exhaustive, which it probably is not, I guess Machiavelli was the first to portray it having magical powers, and from then on it stuck.
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