Derivation of the botanical name:
Ficus, Latin for Ficus carica. The Latin words for fig - ficus, fica (and from them the English word "fig"), derive from the Hebrew word pag פג, meaning "unripe fig". Today the word pag refers to a premature infant.
carica of or pertaining to Caria, a Roman province now south west Turkey around Dalaman river, known for its cultivation of figs.
- The standard author abbreviation L. is used to indicate Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778), a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, the father of modern taxonomy.
The first tree to be mentioned by name in the Bible is the fig, in the story of Adam and Eve: "the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons" (Genesis 3:7).
The Hebrew word used in this reference is Tĕênâh (Greek, σύκον or συκή), fig tree. The four other words used in the Bible refer to different stages of the fruit:
Tĕênîm, תאנים, (plural form of tĕênâh), תאנה, used in Jeremiah 8:13, indicates figs as fruit.
Pag, פג, (Greek, őλυνθος ), used in Song 2:13, is the green or unripened fruit, which remains on the tree through the winter.
Bikkûrah, בכורה, used in Hosea 9:10, is the “firstripe” or “early fig”.
Debelah, דבלה, used in I Samuel 25:18, II Kings 20:7, is a cake of dried figs, the main produce of the tree kept for winter use.
The Ficus carica was cultivated for its fruit some 6500 years ago.
It is a dioecious species with separate male and female trees, and a symbiotic pollinator wasp (Blastophaga psenes) that is propagated inside the fruits (syconia) of male trees called capri figs.
Pollination of edible figs requires fig wasps to transport pollen from Capri fig flowers.
The Ficus carica is native to the region between the Mediterranean and Black Seas.
Evidently many ancient civilizations were aware of the fact that Ficus carica required pollination in order to produce edible, seed-bearing fruits, a process called caprification.
- Aristotle (384-322 BCE) described fig wasps that came out of Capri figs and penetrated the unripe female fig fruits, thus fertilizing them.
- Theophrastus of Eresos (371-287 BCE) was essentially the first botanical taxonomist and some 2,300 years ago he described in details on fig caprification.
In order to prevent the abortion of their embryo cultivar figs, the farmers arranged that ripe wild figs were hung in orchards of the cultivars at embryo stage, or even went so far as to interplant the early, intermediate and late cultivars (you get three crops per annum in the Mediterranean) with the appropriate wild variety.
They were aware of the galls which develop in the inedible or goat-fig and were aware of the insect which came out of the ripe fruit and entered the embryo fruit, allowing it to develop to an edible fig.
The flower of a fig of course, is very unusual in that it is completely enclosed within the fig itself and never seen, male flowers at the top and female below. It is fertilised by a tiny wasp which leaves the ripe fig and enters the embryo fig via a minute hole at the top, which is hidden by overlapping scales.
Each species of fig has developed a symbiosis with a different wasp over the last 100 million years.
- Plato (427 BCE-347 BCE), called figs a food for athletes. The Greeks were well aware of the fig’s value and forbade its export in order to protect Attica’s main resource, "more precious than gold."
- Pliny (23–79 CE), states that homegrown Figs formed a large portion of the food of slaves, especially in the fresh state for agricultural workers.
- Dioscorides (40 – 90 CE), a Greek physician who traveled as a surgeon with the armies of the Roman emperor Nero, compiled De Materia Medica around 77 CE.
De Materia Medica was the foremost classical source of modern botanical terminology and the leading pharmacological text until the 15th century.
He stated how milk clotted with the sap of the fig tree. Fig juice made milk coagulate in the manner of rennet.
Bible resources:
- Genesis 3:7
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
- Numbers 13:23
When they reached the Valley of Eshcol, they cut off a branch bearing a single cluster of grapes. Two of them carried it on a pole between them, along with some pomegranates and figs.
- Numbers 20:5
Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to this terrible place? It has no grain or figs, grapevines or pomegranates. And there is no water to drink!"
- 1 Samuel 25:18
Abigail lost no time. She took two hundred loaves of bread, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs of roasted grain, a hundred cakes of raisins and two hundred cakes of pressed figs, and loaded them on donkeys.
- 1 Samuel 30:12
part of a cake of pressed figs and two cakes of raisins. He ate and was revived, for he had not eaten any food or drunk any water for three days and three nights.
- 2 Samuel 16:1
[ David and Ziba ] When David had gone a short distance beyond the summit, there was Ziba, the steward of Mephibosheth, waiting to meet him. He had a string of donkeys saddled and loaded with two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred cakes of raisins, a hundred cakes of figs and a skin of wine.
- 2 Kings 20:7
Then Isaiah said, "Prepare a poultice of figs." They did so and applied it to the boil, and he recovered.
- Nehemiah 13:15
In those days I saw men in Judah treading winepresses on the Sabbath and bringing in grain and loading it on donkeys, together with wine, grapes, figs and all other kinds of loads. And they were bringing all this into Jerusalem on the Sabbath. Therefore I warned them against selling food on that day.
- Isaiah 34:4
All the stars of the heavens will be dissolved and the sky rolled up like a scroll; all the starry host will fall like withered leaves from the vine, like shriveled figs from the fig tree.
- Isaiah 38:21
Isaiah had said, "Prepare a poultice of figs and apply it to the boil, and he will recover."
QURANIC REFERENCES:
- ‘By the fig, and by the olive! By Mount Sinai, and by this inviolate city.
We created man in a most noble image and in the end we shall reduce
him to the lowest of the low: except the believers who do good works,
for theirs shall be a boundless recompense. What after this can make
you the last judgement? Is God not the best of judges?’
Sura 95: 1-8
SEE: Tu Bishvat (ט"ו בשבט), "The New Year For the Trees"
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