Cockle

Cockle appears in the King James Version of Job 31:40 as the translation of the Hebrew bo'shah, meaning a stinking or worthless plant — likely a weed such as darnel, stinkweed, or the poisonous darnel grass (Lolium temulentum) that was notorious for contaminating wheat fields. Job calls down the curse that if he had misused his land, let thistles grow instead of wheat and cockle instead of barley, invoking agricultural ruin as the fitting consequence of agrarian injustice.

The term relates to the weeds Jesus describes in the parable of the tares (Matthew 13:30), where the enemy sows tares (possibly darnel) among the wheat, and the householder instructs that both be allowed to grow together until harvest. The agricultural background — the difficulty of distinguishing certain weeds from wheat in early growth — underlies the parable's point about the mixed nature of the kingdom community before the final separation. The cockle or noxious weed thus serves in Scripture as a consistent image of worthlessness, blight, and the consequences of folly or sin.