Cucumbers

Cucumbers (Hebrew qishshuim) appear only once in the biblical narrative, in Numbers 11:5, where the Israelites in the wilderness complained: We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. This catalogue of remembered Egyptian produce stands in ironic contrast to the miraculous manna God was providing daily — the Israelites preferred the remembered pleasures of slavery to the miraculous gift of freedom.

The cucumber was indeed a staple of the Egyptian diet and was widely cultivated in the Nile delta and the ancient Near East. Isaiah 1:8 references cucumber fields in the image of Jerusalem left like a lodge in a garden of cucumbers — a watchman's hut in a field, implying desolation and isolation. The single narrative appearance in Numbers places cucumber longing among the symptoms of a deeper spiritual problem: ungrateful discontent with divine provision that looks back to bondage with nostalgia.