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Japanese Yes. In Numbers 11:5 the Israelites in the wilderness remember the cucumbers they ate in Egypt, and in Isaiah 1:8 Jerusalem is left alone “like a lodge in a cucumber field.” The Hebrew word probably meant a long, pale melon, the chate melon, rather than the cucumber sold today.
Where are cucumbers mentioned in the Bible?
The first mention comes in a complaint about food. In the wilderness the people of Israel grow tired of manna and weep for the diet they had as slaves in Egypt:
“Oh that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic. But now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.” (Numbers 11:4–6)
God answers with more meat than they can eat. A wind brings quail around the camp, and “while the meat was yet between their teeth,” a plague strikes the people. The place is named Kibroth-hattaavah, “graves of craving,” because the people who had the craving were buried there (Numbers 11:31–34). A later psalm sums up the episode: “But they had a wanton craving in the wilderness, and put God to the test in the desert; he gave them what they asked, but sent a wasting disease among them” (Psalm 106:14–15).
The second mention is a picture of a ruined land. Isaiah describes cities burned and fields eaten up by foreigners (Isaiah 1:7), and then says: “And the daughter of Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a lodge in a cucumber field, like a besieged city” (Isaiah 1:8). The lodge was a watchman’s hut in the field, a flimsy shelter, and Isaiah uses the same word later for something that sways (Isaiah 24:20). Jerusalem, in the image, stands alone like that hut in a devastated land. The King James Version reads “a lodge in a garden of cucumbers.”
Cucumbers in Jeremiah and Baruch
Most modern translations find cucumbers in one more verse. In Jeremiah 10 the prophet mocks idols made from a tree cut down in the forest and decorated with silver and gold, and says: “Their idols are like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk” (Jeremiah 10:5). The Hebrew phrase is short and difficult. The King James Version reads it as “They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not.” The Brown–Driver–Briggs Hebrew lexicon records the reading of miqshah in this verse as a cucumber field, the same word as in Isaiah 1:8, and the ESV, NIV and RSV translate it that way.
Catholic and Orthodox Bibles also contain the Letter of Jeremiah, which Catholic Bibles print as the sixth chapter of Baruch. It uses the same picture: “Like a scarecrow in a cucumber bed, that guards nothing, so are their gods of wood, overlaid with gold and silver” (Baruch 6:70 in the RSV Catholic Edition; 6:69 in the New American Bible). The Brown–Driver–Briggs lexicon cites this verse beside Jeremiah 10:5.
What were the cucumbers of the Bible?
The Hebrew word in Numbers 11:5 is qishshu’im. It occurs only in that verse, and Isaiah’s miqshah is a field of the same plant. English Bibles have long translated it “cucumbers,” but the plant was probably not the cucumber of modern gardens, Cucumis sativus, which was domesticated in India.
In 2007 Jules Janick, Harry Paris and David Parrish, researchers at Purdue University and Israel’s Agricultural Research Organization, compared ancient images and texts from around the Mediterranean. The rabbinic writings of the Mishnah and Tosefta describe the qishshu’im as so hairy that the hairs had to be rubbed off before eating, which fits the soft, downy young fruit of a melon rather than the warty skin of a cucumber. Following earlier studies of the plants of the Bible by Feliks and Zohary, they identify the qishshu’im of biblical times as chate melons, a kind of melon picked young and eaten like a cucumber. By the time of the Mishnah the word mostly meant the snake melon, a long, thin melon still sold today as the “Armenian cucumber.” They found “no compelling evidence for the existence of Cucumis sativus (cucumber) around the Mediterranean in this time period.”
The “melons” in the same verse, avattichim, are usually identified as watermelons, a fruit that came from Africa and was grown in ancient Egypt. One Catholic translation, the New American Bible, Revised Edition, already reflects the melon reading at Isaiah 1:8, where Zion is left “like a shed in a melon patch.”
Modern Hebrew has moved the words around. Kishu, from the biblical word, now names a squash, and the ordinary word for a cucumber is melafefon, a word the rabbis used for a kind of melon and took from the Greek melopepon.
Do cucumbers have a spiritual meaning in the Bible?
Scripture gives the cucumber no symbolic meaning of its own. In Numbers it is one item on a remembered menu, and the fault the Bible names is the craving. Paul warns the Corinthians that the wilderness failures “took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did” (1 Corinthians 10:6), and commentators such as Charles Ellicott and John Gill connect the words with this episode. In Isaiah, Jeremiah and Baruch, the cucumber field is ordinary farmland that supplies a picture: a hut left standing alone, and a scarecrow that can neither speak nor guard anything. Meanings for cucumbers found in dream guides and symbol lists do not come from the Bible.
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