an unripe fig: the small, hard, green fruit already formed on a fig tree but still months away from being fit to eat
This word appears only once in the whole Bible, in a spring love song, and it names one precise thing: the young fig that has formed on the branch but has not yet ripened. Hebrew had a whole vocabulary for the fig, and this word marks the earliest edge of it. It is not the ordinary word for the fig tree and its fruit (תְּאֵנָה), not the prized first ripe fig of early summer (בִּכּוּרָה), and not figs dried and pressed into a cake (דְּבֵלָה). It is the fruit at the stage where you can see it coming but cannot yet eat it.
That precision is what gives the one verse its force. The man calls the woman out because winter has ended: the rains are gone, flowers are up, the birds are back, the fig tree has put on its young fruit, and the vines are in blossom. Anyone who worked the land could read those small hard figs at a glance. The harvest was still months away, but the season had turned, and with it the time for love.
Later Jewish teachers used the word with the same care, comparing a girl's growing up to the stages of a fig: the unripe fig for childhood, a middle stage for her youth, the full fruit for a grown woman. So this is a farmer's term, exact rather than poetic, and the poem borrows its exactness.
Scholars agree the fruit is unripe but differ over which unripe fig is meant. Most take it as the early crop that swells in spring on the previous year's branches, ahead of the main summer harvest, which fits the poem's setting of winter just past. The ancient Greek translators instead chose a word for the fig that hangs on the tree through winter and never ripens (ὄλυνθος), and later Jewish sources show the term also covered figs that shrivel and drop without ever maturing.
Disputed
Which stage of unripe fig the word denotes: the early spring crop that swells before the leaves, or the late fig that overwinters on the tree without ripening.
- majorityThe early crop of spring, the young figs that form on the previous year's wood ahead of the main summer harvest; the springtime framing of Song of Songs 2:11 to 13 favors this reading.; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982); Oded Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel (Eisenbrauns, 1987); Yehuda Feliks, "Fig," Encyclopaedia Judaica
- minorityThe late, overwintering fig that hangs on the tree without ripening, which is the proper sense of the Greek word the Septuagint translators chose here and used again in Revelation 6:13.; Septuagint, Song of Songs 2:13 (ὀλύνθους αὐτῆς); "Fig," The Jewish Encyclopedia (1901-1906)