INSECTS INJURIOUS TO THE VINE. 125 



The Hebrew word which I have rendered by plant is 

 kihnjon, and the sense of the phrase shews that it must have 

 been a plant large enough to have foliage affording shade. 

 But what was this plant? No one knows. The Septuagint 

 make it a gourd; St. Jerome translates the word ivy; but 

 St. Augustine, in a letter to that father, informs us this change 

 had offended some of the African brethren, who had com- 

 pelled their bishop to withdraw the word from the translation 

 of St Jerome; Sacy, though he retains the ivy of St. Jerome's 

 version because it is in the Vulgate, is disposed to think it 

 was a vine or fig-tree. The pastors of Geneva and M. Gese- 

 nius'^ make Jcikajon a palma Christi, and Bochart^ appears to 

 agree with them in this view of the matter, though he does 

 not, so it seems to us, succeed in showing its soundness, for 

 the texts he adduces in its support are precisely those which 

 furnish the best reasons for adopting a contrary opinion. 



But if we determine beforehand the plant mentioned in this 

 passage of Jonah, we decide also what kind of insect would 

 be likely to destroy it, and we are in danger of giving to the 

 word tholaat a different meaning to what it really has. The 

 chances of error are still greater if we translate with Sacy, 

 " it pierced the ivy by the root;" a fact of which no men- 

 tion is made, either in the Hebrew text, or in that of the 

 Vulgate. If we adopt this version we are in danger of 

 drawing conclusions from false premises, which will be so 

 much the more erroneous in proportion as they shall have 

 been regularly and critically deduced. I am, therefore, justi- 

 fied in altering the translation of the passage so as not to 

 leave any word in it which does not occur in the original. 



From all that has been said, it results that the words 

 rimma and thola, or tholaath, have been often used in the 

 Bible indifferently, one for the other, in the sense of worm, 

 or grub, an animal produced in corruption, vile and con- 

 temptible, but with this difference, that twice the word tholo, 

 or tholaat, is employed to designate a worm that eats a plant. 

 In the first of these passages the plant is the vine, in the 

 second the kind of plant is not known ; but, however, we are 

 sure it is a plant ; and we know that such an animal as there 

 alluded to, though it may have the form of a worm, cannot be 



f Geseiiius, Handbuch, &c., 1828, in 8vo. p. 883. 

 ^ Bocliarti, Hierozoicon, torn. ii. p. 623. 

 NO. II. VOL. IV. S 



