a thorn plant: any low, spiny weed of the sort that pierces bare skin and takes over unworked ground, named generally rather than by species
Biblical Hebrew has an unusually crowded vocabulary for prickly plants, and this is the ordinary, all-purpose member of that set. It does not name a species. It names a kind of nuisance: the spiny, knee-high weeds that cover stony hillsides and abandoned fields around the Mediterranean. When a writer wants something more particular, other words are available, such as the thistle (דַּרְדַּר) that stands beside it in the curse of Genesis, the brier (שָׁמִיר) of Isaiah's ruined farmland, or the woody bramble (אָטָד), which is a tree rather than a weed. This is the word a writer reaches for when the point is simply that the ground bites back.
Three plain facts about the plant do the work in nearly every passage:
- Its spines mean you cannot gather it with bare hands, only with iron.
- Its dry stems catch fire instantly and burn out just as fast, making a fierce and worthless blaze.
- It moves into any field left alone, choking whatever was sown there.
Those facts turn into theology. In Genesis 3:18 thorns are what the cursed ground now offers a farmer, and the prophets keep that association alive: when Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea want to say a covenant has collapsed, they show thorns growing where crops, or even altars, used to be. Hosea 10:8 repeats the exact word pair of Genesis, which is how a reader of both books hears one text quoting the other. The arc closes with promises that the thorns will be cut and burned (Isaiah 33:12) or pulled out of Israel's side for good (Ezekiel 28:24).
The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament renders this word almost every time with ἄκανθα, one of the steadiest word pairings in that translation, and that is how the image reaches the New Testament: the choking weeds of the parable of the sower, the ground that yields "thorns and thistles" in Hebrews 6:8, and the crown pressed onto Jesus' head. The translators pointedly did not use σκόλοψ, the sharper Greek word for a stake or splinter, which they kept for other Hebrew thorn words.
Nuances
Disputed
Which plant, if any, the noun קוֹץ designates: whether it is a generic term for prickly vegetation or the name of a species.
- majorityA comprehensive term for plants with piercing prickles, covering perhaps a dozen species; no single botanical identification should be assigned, and the paired thorn names of Gen 3:18, Isa 32:13 and Hos 10:8 function as merisms for all uncultivated growth.; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible: A Complete Handbook (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13-14, 153-155; Yehuda Feliks, Thistles and Thorns, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed., s.v.; F. Nigel Hepper, Illustrated Encyclopedia of Bible Plants (Baker, 1992)
- minorityWhere a single plant is in view, Notobasis syriaca (Syrian thistle), the commonest thorn of the land.; Yehuda Feliks, Olam ha-Tsome'ah ha-Miqra'i, 2nd ed. (Ramat Gan, 1968), 204-230
- minorityWhere a single plant is in view, Sarcopoterium spinosum (thorny burnet), the dwarf shrub that dominates the scrub of ruined places, which suits the cut-and-burned fuel imagery of Isa 33:12.; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 154-155; Lytton J. Musselman, Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran (Timber Press, 2007), 102-103; Nogah Hareuveni, Nature in Our Biblical Heritage (Neot Kedumim, 1980)