a broad-leaved bush that shoots up fast and casts shade, most likely the castor-oil plant
This word turns up only in the last chapter of Jonah, five times in four verses, and every time it names the same single plant that God raised over the sulking prophet's head. There is no second passage to compare it with, so almost everything we know about the word has to come from that one scene plus the word's life outside the Bible.
That outside trail points to the castor-oil plant. The name came into Hebrew from Egyptian, and the same name shows up in Greek, in Coptic, and in later Hebrew, where in every case it belongs to castor and to the oil pressed from its seeds. A rabbi in the third century said he had seen the plant himself: it grows in wet ground, shopkeepers stood it by their doors for shade, and oil comes from its seeds. Jerome, who translated the word into Latin as "ivy," nevertheless described the actual bush with surprising care: big leaves like a grapevine's (גֶּפֶן), shooting up within months to the height of a small tree, and holding itself upright on its own stem with no stakes or frame. That is castor, and it is neither ivy nor a gourd.
Ancient readers still rendered the word in wildly different ways, and the disagreement left marks far beyond the page. The old Greek Bible read "gourd," and for centuries afterward early Christians painted Jonah dozing under a gourd arbor on tombs and catacomb walls. When one North African bishop read Jerome's "ivy" aloud in church, his congregation nearly walked out. Some respected modern scholars therefore refuse to name a species at all, pointing out that a plant which came up in a night and died in a night matches no real bush anyway.
What the plant does in the story is not in doubt. It is the third of four things God assigns a part to play:
- a great fish that swallows the runaway prophet
- this bush that shades his head for a day
- a worm that kills the bush at dawn
- a scorching east wind that leaves him nothing
Its whole job is to be small. Jonah is overjoyed at a bush he neither planted nor watered, then furious when it dies, and God's last words to him turn that grief into the question the book ends on: if a plant could move him this much, what about a city?
Disputed
Which plant the word names.
- majorityThe castor-oil plant (Ricinus communis). The Egyptian name behind the Hebrew, its Greek, Coptic, and later Hebrew descendants, Resh Lakish's ruling in b. Shabbat 21a that shemen qiq is oil from the qiqayon of Jonah together with Rabbah bar bar Hana's field description, and Jerome's own account of a broad-leaved shrub that stands upright by its own stem all converge on castor. The plant's growth rate, its huge palmate leaves, its range along the Jordan and in Mesopotamia, and its collapse under a hot easterly wind fit the narrative of Jonah 4:6 to 4:8.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) III, s.v. קִיקָיוֹן; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed., eds. Meyer, Donner, Rüterswörden (Springer, 2013), s.v. קִיקָיוֹן; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VII (Sheffield Phoenix, 1993-2011), s.v. קִיקָיוֹן; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 193; Uriel Simon, Jonah (JPS Bible Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1999), on Jonah 4:6
- minorityNo species should be named. Aquila and Theodotion transliterated the Hebrew as κικεών rather than translating it, and a plant said to come up in a night and perish in a night answers to no actual botany, so the responsible course is to carry the word over as a sound rather than to pin a specimen to it. Sasson accordingly transcribes; Trible renders simply plant; Sherwood treats the botanical question as the wrong question and reads the word for its sound, hearing tendrils back to the fish vomiting Jonah in 2:11.; Jack M. Sasson, Jonah: A New Translation with Introduction, Commentary, and Interpretations (Anchor Bible 24B; Doubleday, 1990), 291-292; Phyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah (Fortress, 1994), 220-222; Yvonne Sherwood, A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 252