Mouse in Fausset's Bible Dictionary

'akbar. The "jumping mouse," Dipus jaculus Egyptius (Gesenius); or as the Arabic farah, any small rodent (Tristram); the field mouse or vole, with larger head, shorter ears and tail, and stouter form, than the house mouse; and the long-tailed field mouse, Mus sylvaticus. The ravages of these rodents among grain, etc., made the Philistines propitiate with "golden mice" (five answering to their five political divisions and lords) the God whose instrument of "marring the land" they were (1 Samuel 6). The scourges on them were humiliating to their pride, the tiny mouse and hemorrhoids in the back, where for a warrior to be smitten is a shame (Psalm 78:66). So Sminthian Apollo was worshipped in Crete and the Troad; derived from smintha, Cretan for "mouse"; Apollo was represented with one foot upon a mouse. The Egyptian account of Sennacherib's discomfiture was that the gods sent mice which gnawed his archers' bowstrings, in his expedition to Egypt. The mouse was legally unclean (Isaiah 66:67).

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