HistoricalChristian.Faith

The plant of Jonah 4:6: the castor-oil plant, and neither “gourd” nor “ivy”?

Type: interpretive argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the Hebrew qiqayon that shaded Jonah is, on the best available evidence, the castor-oil plant (Ricinus communis), which is what Jerome himself described when pressed. Both renderings that Africa fought over — the Old Latin and Septuagint cucurbita (“gourd”) and Jerome's own printed hedera (“ivy”) — name the wrong plant, and Jerome conceded as much even while keeping “ivy” in his text.

Related arguments: translating the Old Testament — see also whether the churches' settled text constrains a translator · whether the Latin Old Testament should be made from the Hebrew

The text at issue

And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.

— Jonah 4:6 (KJV). The Hebrew word is qiqayon, a word that occurs nowhere else in the Bible. The Septuagint made it κολοκύνθη, “gourd,” and the Old Latin followed with cucurbita; Aquila and the later Greek revisers made it κισσός, “ivy,” and Jerome's Vulgate followed them with hedera. That single word emptied a church: when a bishop at Oea read Jerome's version aloud, the congregation rioted, and he had to restore the familiar “gourd” “as he desired not to be left without a congregation — a calamity which he narrowly escaped.”¹

Who advances the identification

In its ancient form the identification is Jerome's own. He never claimed that hedera was the plant; challenged over it, he described a third thing altogether, naming it by its Hebrew and Syriac names and explaining that he printed “ivy” only for want of a Latin word and to avoid standing alone against every previous translator. Modern lexicography has converged on the same plant Jerome described, the castor-oil plant or Ricinus communis, and the Talmudic tradition had already identified the qiqayon of Jonah with the plant that yields the oil of kik.²

The evidence for

Jerome's description, made from the plant itself. Twice — in his commentary on Jonah and again in his reply to Augustine — Jerome gives a botanist's account of what he had seen growing in Palestine:

… the Hebrew manuscript has “ciceion,” which is in the Syriac tongue, as now spoken, “ciceia.” It is a kind of shrub having large leaves like a vine, and when planted it quickly springs up to the size of a small tree, standing upright by its own stem, without requiring any support of canes or poles, as both gourds and ivy do.

— Jerome, Letter 112 (to Augustine), §22. The commentary adds that it is “often found growing in Palestine especially in sandy areas,” that it “casts a large shadow and is supported by a trunk,” and that from seed “in a few days it can be seen to have grown from a seedling to a bush.” Every clause of that fits Ricinus communis: a fast-growing shrub of wadi banks and sandy ground in the Levant, self-supporting on a woody stem, with very large palmate leaves — the plant Latin herbals call palma Christi.³

The word. Hebrew qiqayon answers to Egyptian kiki, the name Herodotus, Dioscorides, Strabo and Pliny all give to the Egyptian oil-plant, and to Akkadian kukkanitu; Jerome's Syriac and Punic ciceia is the same word still in local use. The rabbis made the same identification independently, glossing the qiqayon of Jonah by the oil of kik; modern Hebrew still calls the castor-oil plant kikayon.⁴

What the two rival renderings require. Both losing candidates are trailing plants. A gourd and an ivy alike creep unless they are given canes, poles or a trellis — a point Jerome presses hard, since Jonah's plant came up over his head in a night with nothing to climb. Neither Greek nor Latin translator claimed access to better information than the Hebrew word itself; Aquila's “ivy” was already a guess at an unknown, and it is the guess Jerome inherited rather than a finding he made.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The lexical case is strong and comes from three independent directions — the Egyptian and Akkadian cognates, the rabbinic gloss, and Jerome's own autopsy of a plant growing in Palestine that matches the castor bean in habit, leaf, speed of growth and self-supporting stem. Nothing in the narrative resists it: a plant that shoots up quickly and withers when a worm strikes it (Jonah 4:7) is exactly the shape of a Ricinus miracle: a shrub standing on one soft stalk is precisely the kind of plant a boring worm can kill outright, as the next verse says this one did.

What is less certain than it looks. Ancient plant-names are slippery, and a hapax legomenon can never be pinned with the confidence of a common noun. A minority of commentators still prefer the bottle gourd (Cucurbita lagenaria, Arabic qarʻah), which in Palestine and Mesopotamia is routinely trained over exactly the kind of field-booth Jonah had built — so the Septuagint's “gourd” may reflect a real Egyptian-Jewish judgment about what shades a shelter rather than a shot in the dark. That was Augustine's instinct: “I do not think that the Seventy would have rendered it thus at random, had they not known that the plant was something like a gourd.” The reply is that the Septuagint's translators were rendering a word they did not know into a culture that grew gourds, and that the independent Egyptian and Semitic evidence for kiki was not available to them.⁶

Where Jerome overreached, and where he did not. Jerome was right about the plant and wrong in his printed text: having identified a shrub that is neither gourd nor ivy, he set down hedera anyway — “that I might not differ from all other translators” — and then defended the rendering as though the Hebrew supported it. That is a translator's compromise dressed as a finding, and it left him defending a word he had himself shown to be wrong. His polemical explanation of the affair — that the Jews of Oea answered “either through malice or ignorance,” to “make sport of the gourd-planters” — also does more work than the evidence carries: consulted Jews with no Hebrew scroll to hand, asked in Latin or Punic about a Latin word, could easily have given an honest and wrong answer. Both points are noted on his page; neither touches the identification itself.⁷

Assessment

Sound. That the qiqayon of Jonah 4:6 is the castor-oil plant is the mainstream lexical judgment, resting on the Egyptian and Akkadian cognates, the rabbinic identification, and Jerome's own eyewitness description of the shrub — and the bottle-gourd alternative, though not absurd, has only the Septuagint's guess and the shape of a field-booth behind it. Certainty is not available for a word that occurs once in the Hebrew Bible, and the sensible modern practice is to transliterate or annotate rather than to name a familiar European plant. The irony of the quarrel is that neither party held the right word: the congregation at Oea rioted for a gourd that is not there, and Jerome defended an ivy he had himself just disproved. What the riot actually decided was not botany but whether a settled liturgical text may be revised at all, and behind that, which text a Latin Old Testament should be made from.

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