the Week of Proper 25 / Ordinary 30
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Bible Dictionaries
Gourd
Fausset's Bible Dictionary
or 1. Jonah 4:6-10. So Augustine, the Septuagint, and the Syriac explain the Hebrew qiqayown; so modern Jews and Christians at Mosul (Nineveh). In gardens the arbor is often shaded with leaves of the bottle gourd; but the treelike sudden growth of the Ricinus , Ρalma Christi , or castor oil plant make it the more likely; so Jerome describes it, "within a few days you see the plant grown into a little tree"; and Celsius identifies it with the Punic and Syriac el keroa , or Ricinus , and the Hebrew is evidently from the Egyptian kiki , the same plant. The leaves are large and palmate, like a hand with outspread fingers (whence comes the name, Ρalma Christi ), with serrated lobes. Castor oil is made from the seeds.
2. Wild gourds (2 Kings 4:38-41), paqot . It resembles the vine; and as several of the Cucurbitaceoe , melons, pumpkins, etc., from their juiciness, in a hot climate are favourite articles of food, a noxious sort might easily be mistaken for a wholesome kind. The squirting or wild cucumber (Εcbalium elaterium; the fruit opening, from paaqah "to open," and scattering its seeds when touched) and the colocynth (about the size of an orange) are such. The latter is favoured by the old versions, and its derivation also suits the dry gourds, when crushed, bursting or opening with a crashing noise.
Gozan. A river (1 Chronicles 5:26; 2 Kings 17:6; 2 Kings 18:11). There the captive Israelites were transported by Shalmaneser and Esarhaddon. Now the Kizzit Ozan, the golden river of Media, which rises in Kurdistan and ultimately falls into the White River, and so into the Caspian Sea. A country also bore the name of the river, Gauzanitis (Ptolemy, Geog. v. 18); Mygdonia is the same name with the "M" prefixed. So Habor was a region and a river (the Khabour, the affluent of the Euphrates). The region is one of great fertility (Layard, Nineveh and Babylon). G. in G. Rawlinson's view was the district on the river Habor or Khabour.
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Fausset, Andrew R. Entry for 'Gourd'. Fausset's Bible Dictionary. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fbd/g/gourd.html. 1949.
