The word that I have rendered "plant" is kikajon in the Hebrew, and the sense of the passage shows that it was a plant large enough to have foliage sufficient to form a shade. But what is this plant? No one is acquainted with it. In the Septuagint it is called a gourd, and St. Jerome makes it an ivy, but St. Augustine informs us in a letter to that Father, that the people of Africa were greatly shocked by this alteration, and obliged their bishop to remove the word ivy from the version of St. Jerome. De Sacy, who retains in his version the ivy of St. Jerome because it is the text of the Vulgate, inclines to the idea that it'is a vine or a fig-tree. The pastors of Geneva and M. Gesenius[1] make the Kikajon a Ricinus agreeing with Bochart[2], who leans to the same opinion; but he, far from having proved it, brings before us texts which support the contrary opinion.
But if we indulge in conjectures respecting the plant mentioned in this passage of Jerome, we must for the same reason conjecture the species of insect which caused its destruction, and shall thus be liable to give to the word Tholaat a different signification from that really belonging to it. The liability to error is much increased if we translate with De Sacy, "it pricked the ivy at the root," a circumstance which is not mentioned either in the Hebrew text or in the Vulgate, and which would expose us to the danger of drawing consequences from false premises, which would be erroneous in proportion to the regularity and learning with which they were deduced.
I have therefore altered the translation of the text in such a manner as to leave nothing that may not be read with certitude.
From all that has just been said it appears that the words Rimma, and Thola or Tholaath, are often indifferently employed in the Bible, one for the other, in the sense of worm or grub, of an animal born of corruption, vile, and despicable; but with this difference, that the word Thola or Tholaat is twice used in the Bible to designate a worm which preys upon a plant. In the first of the passages alluded to this plant is the vine; we are ignorant of the species of plant intended in the second passage, but we are certain that it is a plant. We know that such an animal, though it possesses the form of a worm, is not one strictly speaking; we are certain that it is either a grub, or a little insect, or the larva of an insect subject to metamorphosis. The word Rimma has never been employed in this last sense, at least not in the Bible. It appears therefore that in this point of view the Hebrew language is richer than our own, since in ordinary discourse we have only one word to designate the worms of the nut, pear, apple, and all other fruits, and likewise the earthworm, though these animals differ not only in genus, but belong to very different orders[3].
